Warren Jamison

Here's How to Nail Down Your First Assignment as a Collaborator

If you lack substantial published writing credits, you'll have to pay your dues to get your first assignment. This means you'll need to do the first one for no money upfront and a 50/50 split of future royalties with your expert.

You may feel like screaming, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn't the speedy trip to big money that your title promised.”

Ah, but it is.

Consider the alternative. You don't have any credits for published writing. Unless you do something drastically different from what you have been doing, in five—even twenty-five—years, the odds say you still won't have any. Compared to that, writing one book for no money upfront and seeing it on bookstore shelves a year or two from now is rapid entry into paid publication. It's not a tortoise and hare race; the race is between fiction's comatose turtle and nonfiction's healthy jackrabbit.

The Nonfiction Hit

Much of the above realities hit me full force while reading Publishers Weekly late in the 1970s. The article contained a chart comparing the number of titles published in several categories, along with sales figures. The totals shocked me. By switching to nonfiction, I saw that two factors would give my chances of getting published a huge boost:

(a) Nonfiction accounts for ten times as many titles as fiction. Multiply my pub chances by ten.

(b) The number of unpublished writers trying to break into fiction is at least ten times the number aiming at nonfiction. (This is a conservative estimate. Check it out at any writer’s conference or club meeting. Chances are you won’t find many people working on a nonfiction book.) Multiply my pub chances by ten one more time.

Let’s do the math (really a mind strainer) 10 x 10 = 100. Your chances of getting published are multiplied by at least 100 simply by deciding to switch from fiction to nonfiction.

Scoffers will say, “OK, but my pub chance was zero to begin with, so 100 times zero is still diddly-squat.

It didn’t zero out for me. The more I studied breaking into nonfiction, the harder the reality hit me: I didn’t have enough expertise or credibility in any publishable subject to write a book a trade publisher would take on. So I thought, “OK, I’ll just pick a topic and research and study it until I do have the necessary expertise.”

However, it soon dawned on me that expertise alone wouldn’t necessarily be enough; successful books are written (supposedly) by experts in their niche who also promote the book effectively.

Question: Who cares whether someone else did the actual writing?

Answer: Nobody.

Final Words about Fiction

A few more words and we’ll be done with fiction. Then we’ll get back to how you can race down the rapid road to publication and the financial and emotional satisfactions it brings.

Short stories. The publication of short stores by major magazines has been declining for years and by 2007 had come to almost a complete stop. So had most of what used to be major magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly. They were laid low by changing tastes and increased competition on every side. Specialty magazines aimed at specific groups of people who shared a certain interest—Surfing, Powder Skiing, Wooden Boat and thousands of others niches—each took a bite out of the general interest, fiction-publishing magazines.

The newer breed of specialty magazines rarely publish fiction; instead they are are filled with nonfiction articles that offer information the editors believe their readers will find interesting.

Novels. You’d think that going to all the trouble of writing a full-length novel would earn you some respect, some consideration. Forget it. Did any agent or publisher ask you to write your novel?

Keep in mind that the publishing industry is a collection of businesses as profit-hungry as giant corporations or the corner Mom and Pop shop are in any industry. It’s all about money; about feeding their bottom line. Nothing wrong with that; I state it not as a criticism but as a hard fact that aspiring writer should have no illusions about. Never forget that publishing, magazines or books, is a business—and a tough one. Publishing companies as well as magazines, particularly start-ups, often close their doors and disappear—frequently owing writers money.

If a publishing company can’t see profit in bringing your book out, they’ll pass on investing in publishing it. They have to invest several thousand dollars—some trade editors claim their cost of putting a book into the marketplace is about $25,000. Since your previous work, if any, hasn’t created an audience for your book, how will they be able to sell enough copies to break even, much less make a profit? You must have a good answer for that question or your book—no matter how well written—won’t get published.

And Do It Right Now In Less Than Two Minutes

Only about a tenth of the new titles published today are fiction if we exclude just one genre, romance, mostly written by and for women. This category is sometimes looked down on, which makes no sense. When westerns were selling strongly, they were just as formulaic in their own way as romance is today; yet western writers enjoyed considerable status. If you’re interested in writing romance, make no mistake about it: it’s a difficult and highly competitive discipline. Breaking into this market requires talent, commitment and persistence of the highest order.

In the middle of the last century the ratio between fiction and nonfiction was about fifty-fifty as to the number of new titles published. However, fiction accounted for considerably more than half of the book industry’s dollar volume. In the following decades, competition from television and other forms of entertainment has greatly reduced fiction’s importance to the book industry.

Most new fiction published today is written by established writers. Only about 500 debut novels (first novels) are now being published in this country each year. That’s barely more than one a day. Sound good? Keep on reading.

At least 200,000 Americans aspire to be writers. There’s some reason to believe the real number runs as high as twenty percent of the population—in other words many, many millions of people. More are based in Australia, Canada and the UK, not to mention India, where English is a second language to the most influential three percent of India’s billion-plus population. Most aspirants everywhere are intent on writing novels. Few of these hopefuls realize they are competing to be one of the annual crop of just 500 debut novelists. OK, multiply that number by 10. Say there are 5,000 debut novels printed in the USA each year (don’t quote me on that number; it’s wildly exaggerated). The odds against success are still hugely discouraging.

So how do you multiply your chances by 100 in two minutes? By deciding to switch to nonfiction. (Actually, you can do that in two seconds, but that sounds like an extreme claim.) If you don’t have enough credibility and expertise in a saleable topic, collaborate with an expert who does. Future posts will tell you exactly how to become a highly successful collaborative writer. <>

Until you publish something, nobody wants to let you write their book. Nevertheless, collaboration is your best chance to get published. I’ll tell you how to do that.

1. Somehow you just can’t seem to break through and see your stuff published by the trade and you aren’t interested in self-pubbing on the Net because you want the prestige that having your book sold in bookstores all over the nation.

2. You are talented, you are determined—all you lack is writing credibility. That’s what it takes to convince any expert who has enough expertise to fill a book that you have what it takes to write their manuscript (MS)1 better than they can. So the first thing they ask is that same old weasel question, “What have you published?”

3. My first published book was a joint venture (JV) with no money upfront; nevertheless, it has been one of my most lucrative books. My share of its earnings run well into six figures so far. Yes, it’s still selling, still earning royalties more than twenty years after publication.

4. What had I published before? Nothing. Literally, not a word other than a handful of letters to the editor of local papers and national magazines—which added up to nothing when you’re talking to someone who might pay you money to work on their book.

5. OK, so what was my writing credibility back then? Let’s examine the concept of writing credibility. First of all, it walks on two legs:

6. (a) Your credibility to yourself. If you aren’t convinced that you have what it takes to complete a powerful MS, how can you expect to convince someone else? How you will overcome this vital challenge? If you don’t know instantly, think this one through. Here are three questions to help you decide what it will take to convince yourself that you are capable of writing a book about an expert’s niche in collaboration with this expert.

7. 1. Do you have the following ready to go?

8. a writing space in your home

9. a computer and printer.

10. Internet access, preferably high speed

11. 2. Have you completed at least one MS? Could be fiction. The important thing is to have finished it, whether or not you were able to sell it.

12. 3. Do you tell people you are a writer? Sure, you’ll get smirked at when they ask what you’ve published, but that just helps you develop the tough hide a pro writer must have. The vital thing is to internalize the concept that you are a professional writer.

13. (b) Your credibility to experts so you can convince them to become your clients.

14. The first expert I worked with was carefully chosen. And, though we didn’t know it then, our timing was right on. I say “we” because choosing this particular expert was my wife’s idea.

15. Here’s how it worked. I knew I could write and complete a long MS because I had already written several novels, none of which were ever in any danger of being published. The important thing was that I had completed them. The first was 682 MS pages or about 170,000 words. The others were shorter. Counting all the rewrites, my first novel probably involved writing half a million words. Add in the other half-dozen novels and several abandoned projects, I must have written at least a million words during what turned out to be my writing apprenticeship.

16. However, writing a large number of words is the least significant aspect of your all-important self-training apprenticeship. Improvement comes from constant study as you write. When you are uncertain about some detail of grammar, punc­tuation, spelling or formatting, research that item until you know how to handle it.

17. My recommendations of the best five books for writers are listed in the Appendix. They will answer most questions so keep them handy. You can also search the Internet. Try both ways, print or Web, and use what’s quickest for you.

18. Also, as you write your apprenticeship half million words, study the trade magazines and sign up on the Web for helpful newsletters. Several that I’ve found helpful are listed in—yep, you guessed it—in the Appendix. If you’ve already written some novels, you will already have gained confidence in your writing skills. Your challenge now is to convert confidence into cash.

1All the acronyms, abbreviations and trade jargon used in this book are explained in the Appendix.

“Book doctor” doesn’t really capture what most of my clients want done. Before I can “doctor” a book, there has to be a manuscript. Usually there isn’t one. This calls for activities closer to obstetrics than general practice.

But an obstetrician can only go so far. Providing the book’s fertilized egg—or, better yet, its healthy 3rd trimester fetus—is your business. In other words, a successful collaboration starts with some good material.

Nevertheless, a few people have called with only a general idea of what subject they wanted their book and seminar to cover. The order is wrong there, you might instantly conclude; it should be seminar first, book second, and you’d be right if you were thinking of neophyte speakers.

However, speakers who are already effective in one niche generally find it easy to conquer another related niche. For them, using a book as a battering ram to break into their second, or seventeenth, niche makes great sense. Publishing a book about their new niche can get them off to a flying start. Being recognized as an authority in your new niche is the quickest route to profitability.

How can you as a successful speaker on Subject A, break into Subject B with the least possible investment of your limited time? You can have an experienced book obstetrician adapt your present seminar to the new subject. However, this only works when B is closely related to Subject A. If the stretch is too far for that, your book obstetrician can produce a manuscript from a transcript of your Subject B seminar.

Let’s say you have to go to plan C because neither of the above will work. In other words, you need to get your Subject B book written from scratch, and expect the effort you put into it will also organize your new seminar.

You start in the same way you did when preparing a talk for Toastmasters. List the topics you’ll cover. Then expand on each topic. Build your seminar brick by brick. An easy way that works well is for clients to email a beginning outline of 5 or 10 pages to me. I make some additions and suggestions and shoot it back to them, and this back and forth goes on like a ball being whapped back and forth in a tennis match. Chapters soon emerge, and are exchanged as separate emails. This process continues until a publishable manuscript is born. I’m now in the middle stages of such a tennis match with a client who lives in France. She liked the image, and we use “Tennis 5” and “Tennis 6” as the subject of our emails.

The main thing is to get started. Superselling, which Ed McMahon and I co-authored, is just under 70,000 words (169 pages). If you write just 300 words every day, you’ll have your 70,000 words in less than eight months. If you’re more comfortable talking than writing, it’s even easier for you. All you have to do is talk 300 words a day. Boost it up to 1,000 words a day and you’ll finish in just over 2 months.

Get started. If the details stop you, give me a call and I’ll help you get rolling.

(503) 636-7575 ; Email: W@Jamison.org#

This article originally appeared in slightly abbreviated form in Sharing Ideas Magazine. This intriguing publication is a must-read for anyone interested in paid public speaking.

In the twenty plus years that my books have been published by half a dozen major houses such as Simon & Schuster and Warner Books, I have asked myself the headline question every time a royalty statement arrives. Like all of my writer friends, I’ve never seen a royalty statement I could understand. (This was true when I first wrote it. However, I have since received royalty statements from South-Western Publishing, a division of Thomson Learning. Their statements are informative and easy to understand. I’d like to think this heralds a general push by publishers to reform their royalty statements, but so far little has changed.)

The Authors Guild is one of two splendid professional organizations I joined in the 1980s. The Guild puts on a one-evening seminar for members called “Breaking the Code.” The quantity and quality of the insights it provided blew me away; I want to share some of that information with you.

As I had long suspected, royalty statements are opaque because publishers want to give authors the least possible information about their books. Publishers have developed diabolically clever ways to offer authors a better deal than they intend to deliver. For example, some of them offer you a 15% royalty on the retail price of the book-it says so right there in their publishing contract. However, read the fine print. This applies only if they sell your book at their normal trade discount of 48% off list.

It still sounds like a good split, doesn’t it? Of the remaining 52 percent, the author gets 15 and the publishers retain 37 percent, out of which they must pay the cost of printing, warehousing, distribution, their editorial overhead, and make a profit.

Let me illustrate those numbers. In the first six months after publication, your book’s sales, at retail list, total a sensational $1,000,000. The bookstores get 48% of that million, $480,000, less any discounts they give their customers; the publishers get $370,000; and you get $150,000.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Then your royalty statement arrives with a check for $70,000. Typically, your royalty statement consists of several pages of computer-generated confusion. Nothing seems to relate to anything else. What happened to the other $80,000 you expected-and maybe already spent?

After studying the royalty statement, you suspect that most of your book sales were not figured at 15% of list price. How come?

Chances are you won’t be able to figure it out, because the statement is designed to keep you from understanding why. When you get to talk to a live human at the royalty department, his or her explanation probably won’t explain much. They’re all well trained.

Here’s one way they get away with it without violating the publishing contract. The fine print of their contract says books sold at a larger discount than their customary 48% are figured on the publisher’s net receipts, not on the book’s cover price. Right away they’ve cut your royalty almost in half. This means they can, and often do, make sweetheart deals with bookstores to add an extra 2% discount. By selling the books for less, the pubs make more because boosting bookstore discount by 2% cuts your royalty from 15% to about 7%. The pub makes 5% more, the bookstores make more; everybody wins except you, the author.

Let me pass on one vital bit of information: no auditor can improve a bad publishing contract. Unless you do your homework before you sign one, you’ll get royal reamings instead of a fat royalty checks. The statute of limitations on royalty chiseling and mistakes is often only 4 years (it varies from state to state), so if you want to have your royalties audited, get moving. I’m having a royalty audit done right now on a contingency basis. The auditors keep a third of anything they recover; no collection, no fee. They won’t take on any book that hasn’t already earned its advance. If you’d like to get in touch with my auditor, call me at (503) 636-7575 or email me at W@Jamison.org.

Avoid the Common Markers of Amateurish Writing

The first step toward enhancing your writing skills is to avoid the common markers of amateurish writing. We’ll begin our discussion with overintensity, afterwards called “wow” in this article.

Wow often pops up in the material clients send me. I don’t mind because with a search and replace passes I can remove it, thereby vastly improving the piece quickly. You could do the same instead of paying me to do it for you.

Good writing doesn’t need intensification because it’s tight, vivid, and informative. When you sit down to revise your first draft, take out what isn’t tight, vivid, and informative-it will always improve your writing.

In wow writing, nothing is simply hot, big, unique or whatever-it’s always very hot, very big, or-impossibly-very unique. (A thing is either unique, or not unique.) Logically, something could be “very unusual,” but why not just “unusual?”

Very

If you use “very” more than once in a thousand words, you’re overusing it. Just by deleting almost every “very” your writing becomes a considerably tighter, swifter, and a more professional read. But the overuse of very is merely the tip of overintensification. Let’s look at several more forms of this writing disease.

The Bang

Overuse of the bang (the exclamation point) is probably the most egregious form of wow. The triple bang !!! is more so, of course, but the infamous quintuple bang (!!!!!) must be the most egregious. The bang tells the reader, “Wake up and pay attention because you just read something terribly witty or astonishing. You would have missed it, dumbo, if I hadn’t given it a bang!”

Never use a bang if you can avoid it. Make your writing tight and vivid so your readers will be intrigued and continue reading your stuff. Always write and punctuate with the style and purpose that lets your readers decide what amazes them.

Multiple Question Marks (???)

Using more than one question mark is always a no-no unless you’re a teenager writing love letters. Then it’s cool-until you’re about 14 when you realize it’s kid stuff.

ALL CAPS

This one comes naturally to inexperienced writers. Used infrequently, one or a few all-caps words can make an idea jump off the page; used often, it gives your work a chaotic look because every all-caps entry clamors for attention. All-caps have a noisy feel, like a train roaring past under your window. If you’re writing a novel about street crime and gang warfare, a chaotic style may be just the thing, but it’s not if your book is nonfiction.

Where’s the line between infrequent use and overuse? Up to three instances in a 200-page book is infrequent; once in each chapter is overuse. Although upper and lower case is more readable, it’s okay to use all caps in headings.

However, when ALL CAPS appears in the body of an upper and lower case paragraph (as in this one) almost always it’s a case of pure wow. Blotches of all caps subtly tell the reader to skip the rest of the paragraph.

Rogue Capitalization

“Capitalization” refers to capitalizing only the first letter of a word, in contrast to all caps. Capitalizing invented terms is author intrusion, generally a risky proposition because it diverts reader attention from the message. This comes up frequently in my work with clients. However, the capitalization of invented terms is a useful technique if used consistently and with great restraint.

A recent project clarified when it’s effective to capitalize a term and when its use becomes excessive. It was effective for a term that also appears in the title of the book, and we limited personification to each repetition of that single term. However, the client had sown capitalized invented terms throughout his manuscript as though he was spreading seeds on the lawn. Clearly excessive. We agreed to lower-case all the other terms he had invented.

Italics

Italics are the most acceptable form of adding emphasis. But use it sparingly. You can for example, italicize only a prefix, as in de-emphasize and make your meaning gently pop out. Italics tend to be confusing unless applied consistently, which can be a greater challenge than one might suspect.

Random Bold Face

Bold Face shouts; italics whisper. Bold Face is legitimately used in headings, but peppering your text with random bold face is another sure way to create choppy looking, gangsta pages. Avoid this in formal writing. In any other kind of communication, if you must use bold face, do so with restraint. Frequent use destroys its shock value; leaving only pages that look like pasted up ransom notes.

In a different book, the primary author had coined about twenty terms and capitalized them to identify people with certain habits, both good and bad. His manuscript used every form of overintensification I had ever encountered. His manuscript looked like an anthology of ransom notes, with all caps, italics, and bold face competing for attention.

Just one more tip on making your writing more vivid: search your next-to-final draft for “nice.” When you find an instance of that meaningless word, it’s 100 to 1 that replacing nice with a stronger, more descriptive adjective will make your writing more vivid. For example, suppose you wrote, “He is a nice old gentleman.” Substitute any of the following for nice and you’ll paint a more vivid picture of the old fellow for your readers: kindly, neat, gaunt, stooped, bright-eyed, red-faced, and so on.

In every activity, the difference between a professional and an amateur is that the pro takes more pains with her or his work. Write your first draft fast; don’t worry about spelling, grammar, wow, or anything else-concentrate on capturing your basic ideas on screen or paper. Then revise, print out, and revise again. And again-until you’re certain you can’t improve on your work. That’s how you give your writing the professional stroke.

All forms of wow make writing more difficult to understand. They divert the readers’ attention from your message to your chaotic style, and thereby lessen their faith in what you’re trying to convey.

w@jamison.org, phone: (503) 636-7575.

1. Publishing a book casts a unique aura of validation over its author. Often this aura is the decisive factor in turning hesitating prospects into lucrative clients.

2. Readers and potential clients know they are dealing with an established, reputable, and capable person or organization when given a book that is professionally done in every respect. Whether it’s an adhesive bound paperback or a case bound hardcover, it will carry great conviction if the content equals the packaging in quality. On the other hand, spiral bound books often make a slap-dash impression.

3. A book provides ample space to cite case histories and tell stories describing how previous clients, patients, customers, or students have reaped great benefits from your products and services. In a book you can do this far more thoroughly, and therefore more convincingly, than is practical in conventional presentations.

4. By establishing your credentials with complete background information, a book allows you to focus your presentations on providing precise solutions to a given client’s specific problems.

5. Unlike almost all forms of advertising, people pay you for the privilege of placing your impressive 200 to 400 page advertisement in their homes and offices. While you may give a copy of your book to some outstanding prospects, many others will buy it off the shelf, at your seminars, or respond to a direct mail offer. Thus a trust-building book becomes a self-liquidating investment in addition to its role in boosting sales.

6. The impact of a TV commercial is measured in seconds, of a newspaper ad in days, and a magazine ad in weeks. A book on the other hand delivers its message for years.

7. In the back of your book, devote one or two pages to direct ad material advertising your products and services, including all your phone numbers, addresses, Internet connections, and other contact information. These cost-free direct ads are constant business-pullers because most of your books will be in the hands of people with a special interest in your type of activity.

w@jamison.org, phone: (503) 636-7575.