Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

Last week, I posted some resources for finding agents.
It’s really tough to find representation.  I think, honestly, there are lots of reasons for this.

One is that agents need to believe they can find a buyer for the manuscript you’re pitching.

I have a strong suspicion that another reason is because just one author is a lot of work.

My agent, Ellen Pepus, spends a lot of time just with me.  I know this because of the number of emails that we send back and forth when we’re really at fever pitch before deadline.

Ellen likes to edit.  Not every agent is like that, but a lot of them are. So she’s making editorial suggestions for me before we send the manuscript to the editor.

Ellen also does other things I don’t want to do—like make friends with industry professionals.  I’m really uncomfortable schmoozing and who knows…she might be too.  But she does it a heck of a lot better than I do.

She keeps track of my checks—what I’ve been paid for, what I’m due for.  Ellen sends me a statement for my taxes.  I have a hard time keeping up with the money side of the business.  I’m familiar with my contract, of course, but I don’t really want to spend my time hunting down manuscript-acceptance checks, or Kindle-version royalties, or my author copies, or whatever.

If I have any questions about release dates or deadlines or what exactly my editor is looking for?  She takes care of that, too.

Basically, Ellen gets to do the dirty work and I get to just write and promote books.   Which works out really well…for me, anyway.

There are some weeks that I’m a lot less time-consuming than others.  But then—it seems like everything happens at once and I’ve buried my agent again.

Thanks to Ellen for all that she handles for me.  And best of luck to everybody on their agent search.  It does take a long time to find an agent (years, in my case), but in the end the effort is definitely worth it.

During my August book tour, I visited lots of different bookstores and talked to many different managers.

Several of them mentioned, with some concern, the e-book revolution.  One manager went so far as to say that their bookstore would likely resemble an Apple store or a cell phone retailer in a few years—with e-readers and e-reader accessories on display. 

She added that bookstore staff would be needed to sell and offer customer support for the readers.  They’d have a service department to fix or replace broken e-readers.

And she said, of course, they’d need a lot less retail space.  Although they might keep the cafes open since that brought people in.  So customers could read books on their e-readers and drink coffee and study.

Although I’ve thought a lot about the e-reading revolution, I’d never really thought of bookstores actually changing.  I think I’d just sadly written them off as closing their doors and having an online storefront only.

The one thing that I did hear consistently from the managers was their concern over book browsing.  Which is understandable—you wouldn’t be able to pick up an e-book, feel it, or flip through it. 
Or could you?

I’m not going to get into the e-reader debate, mostly because I’m resigned to the fate of books at this point and just planning on going with the flow—at least, in this computer-centered future, people are still reading—but I have noticed that my own book-buying habits have been changing, even with the physical books that I buy.

I look online a lot for book recommendations.  In fact, I look almost exclusively online for book recommendations.  Our newspaper here seems determined to review books that are heavy lit fict (not my current cup of tea), so I’ve had to find reviews elsewhere…and the book bloggers do a bang-up job at it.

I like sites like “What Should I Read Next” which help direct readers to books similar in style and genre to books they’ve enjoyed.

You can frequently read an online preview—a first chapter or an excerpt of the book you’re interested in—of the book you’re interested in. Not quite the same as flipping through a book at the store, but I could get used to it.

And for those of us who say covers can make a difference in our book buying?  The covers aren’t going away—they’re right there, online, in living color.  So we can judge a book by its cover as often as we like.

I’m fond of the automatically-generated “people who bought this book also bought these books” lists.  Frequently I find some really interesting series that way. 

What about those specialty bookstores and Mom and Pop bookstores?  It kills me, it really does. I love those bookstores. But eventually—maybe they’ll move their stores online?  Maybe they’ll still be offering their incredible expertise to readers and directing them to great books…just in a new and different way.

No, there’s nothing like picking up a book—or a pile of books—and flipping through them at the bookstore.  Bookstores and libraries have always been my favorite places.  I still  hope that there would be a need for libraries a long time into the future.  It’s hard to be upbeat about all the changes.

But as long as we still have books and readers—that’s the most important thing.  We’ll just have to find new ways to discover good books.

How do you shop for books?  Online?  In a bookstore?  How are you finding books to read? 

Every time I write a book, I’m surprised by the problems I run into—even though the problems are always the same. And actually, looking at my list of issues, I’m not sure there’s a whole lot I can do to prevent them from cropping up, unless I really wanted to change my approach to writing a book. Maybe that’s why they keep recurring!

5 Questions that Always Pop Up Once While Writing My Books

1. Where do I go next? I’m guessing this is a problem faced more frequently by folks who don’t outline…people like me. Usually I have an idea in my head about where I want to go next with the plot and the characters. But a few times in each book, I have an uhhhh moment where I’m really not sure what I’m writing in the next scene. Or the one after that.

2.What’s this character’s deal? Sometimes my characters aren’t well-behaved. In every book, a character will either try to steal scenes, act out of character, try to change their character, or exhibit a stunning lack of motivation. This is one of those problems I look out for while I’m writing a book—and I fix it when I see it, going forward from that point in the manuscript. Otherwise it can make a huge mess in a story. But I’m always so surprised when it happens!

3. Whodunit? Okay, this is going to be specific to mystery writers—but I don’t usually have a killer planned out until much later in the story. I like it that way because it means that I set up all my suspects as possible murderers. But—it means that at the end of the book I’m going back and forth…and back and forth…and back and forth on the killer’s identity.

4. How am I going to wrap this up? Writing endings is tough for me. Beginnings I like, but wrapping up a book? Ugh. I manage to conveniently forget what a pain it is for me until it’s time for me to write another one.

5. How many more pages are there left to write?! It’s actually pretty easy for me to get overwhelmed when writing–which is why I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the unwritten pages stretching ahead of me…it’s easy to freak myself out. But I don’t feel overwhelmed when I start a project—but I sure do about a third of the way through.

Maybe forgetting these things is my subconscious way to ensure I keep writing books. Because if I remembered my struggles with this stuff, then I’d probably start a new book with a lot more trepidation than I do.

Are there problems that you always encounter when writing? Do you find that you forget about them in between projects?

My daughter is nine years old. Like lots of nine year olds, she loves to poll everyone on their favorites.

And you’d better have an answer.

I haven’t thought very much about my favorite anything for probably the last thirty years.

Until now. :) After several conversations with my daughter that ended with her saying, “How could you not know what your favorite song/color/food/season/book/movie is?!” then I actually took a few minutes to think about it one night.

I was able to make some headway on some of my favorites. I’m partial to yellow, although brown is my favorite color to wear. I like spring. I still wasn’t too sure about a favorite song, book, or movie.

My daughter, though, wasn’t going to leave it at that. Why was spring my favorite season? Had it always been my favorite?

This actually, made me think a little deeper about it. Winter was my least favorite season, so spring always makes me feel relieved because winter is over. I always did love spring—especially when I was a kid because I have a spring birthday…and we had Daylight Saving Time, which meant more time to play outside in the evenings.

It started me thinking about my characters’ favorites.

I didn’t used to do major profiles of my characters before writing because I felt I knew my characters right off the bat. They were frequently amalgams of people I knew and were easy for me to write.

But now, I’ve written so many characters that I’m finding character surveys more helpful.

What are my characters’ favorite TV shows? Why? Or do they even watch TV? Are they readers, instead?

I don’t spend a ton of time doing character profiles, but I spend a lot more time than I used to. I rarely use the information that I come up with in my books, but it does help me to create a more rounded character that pops off the page.

One of the more helpful collections of character development worksheets can be found here: Adventures in Children’s Publishing (and, no worries…these worksheets are for adult characters, too). There are four parts to the worksheet and four posts on it.

Do you know your characters’ favorites?

On Saturday, the kids and I went on a bike ride.

We’re mismatched bikers. My teenage son is the super biker, easily losing us without even realizing it. My daughter is still on a little-kid bike with no gears, and I need to stick behind her to make sure she doesn’t get left behind. Me? I’ll fall off the bike if I bike too slowly…which sometimes happens when the greenway gets too sandy and my daughter pops off her bike unexpectedly to walk the trail instead of bike it. I always seem to think I can stay on the bike just going slowly behind her as she walks…but I topple off it, instead.

There was a man running on the greenway while the children and I were on our bike ride. To me, he was sort of like Pepe Le Pew from the Bugs Bunny cartoons…not for any olfactory reasons, but because no matter how hard we biked, he always ended up right on the point of passing us.

Obviously, this is because we were stopping a lot. My daughter had to stop once because her legs hurt. The chain on my son’s bike came off once and we stopped to get it back on. My daughter stopped for water a couple of times.

Each time my daughter and I stopped, my son kept biking ahead until a point where he realized we weren’t there anymore (which seemed to take a while.) So my daughter and I ended up pedaling really fast to catch up. Which wore me out (since I’m no longer designed to be a speedy biker) and then I had to stop and rest.

And each time we got passed by this man in his late-50s who was jogging along very steadily. Every time I’d hear the pat-pat-pat of his feet, I’d look up with disbelief. No matter how fast we’d been biking before, our little pit stops meant he always caught up quickly.

Finally I said to him, “I think it’s really sad that you’re going faster than us and we’re on bikes!” Which he thought was funny, although he blushed a little.

But it’s like that, isn’t it, for a lot in life—slow and steady wins the race.

Before deadlines ruled my writing life, I always wrote a page a day. I remember telling the critique group that I was in at the time my daily goal…and they thought I wasn’t writing enough.

But—I ended up with a finished book before they did. That page a day was manageable for me. So I did it every day, without fail.

If I feel like I’m behind with a book and start scrambling, I’ll end up burned out or irritated with the manuscript or myself.

If I go too slow, I get overwhelmed by the project and the amount I have left to write.

It’s like a New Year’s Resolution—it’s better not to make a resolution to lose twenty pounds. Better to make a resolution to cut out junky afternoon snacks, or to stop drinking soda, or to walk twice a week or something else that’s more manageable. Something we’ll actually do.

Because everyone wants to feel successful. And if we haven’t set ourselves up for success with our pacing, it’s easy to just ditch the project altogether when we get frustrated or burned out.

How are you pacing yourself?