On Spec or Proposal?

Would you like to buy my book?

A second way to write is to create the concept, a couple sample chapters and put together a book proposal. This is common for experienced writers, nonfiction topics and series.

What goes into a proposal?

A proposal includes a clear concept and samples of the writing that will appear in the finished manuscript. Let’s look at non-fiction and fiction separately.

Fiction Proposal

Concept: For fiction, a book proposal a high-concept catchy one-liner is helpful. “Boy meets girl” isn’t enough. You’ll need something interesting enough to carry the proposal, so think about how to phrase the one-liner, the hook.

A love affair with a twist: she wants his bite, but he wants her humanity.

Chapter Breakdown: Usually the first book in a series must have a couple lines per chapter. The editors will want to know that you can, indeed, plot a tight story. Each chapter should include a couple lines about the major actions of the story.

Characters: Sometimes, it’s helpful to include short sketches of each major character. Nothing long, a paragraph at most. Make sure each is unique and interesting and contributes to the story.

Series Outline: If you’re proposing a series, then you’ll need half a page or so on each title. Include an overview with the main problem, major complications and a resolution.

Your Bio: Why are you the best person to write this story? What are your past publications, etc. Keep this specific to the proposal, yet general enough to cover your career.

Writing Sample: You must include a sample of the writing for this book, so the editor has a clear idea of what they will get for this contract. Don’t be skimpy. Write three solid chapters and polish them, put your best foot forward.

Letter: This is the usual business letter that you would include with any query or submission letter. Be sure to include the series hook and a hook for the first book.

NonFiction Proposal

The nonfiction proposal includes everything above, except maybe the character sketches. For a biography, though, you’d include it as well. The extra for a nonfiction proposal is the bibliography. You course, you’ll uncover many more resources as you write your story, but you need enough here to let the editor know you have material to write about.

Especially important here is your access to sources. If an editor gets two similar proposals for stories about George Washington, s/he’ll look at the access to sources. Writer A has done online research and has uncovered interesting info. Writer B, though, has contacted Mount Vernon and has an invitation to stay in the VIP suite while talking to staff about the research.

Which writer would you give a contract? Writer B, every time!

With competition so stiff these days, make sure you have the best access to sources possible. It will make your proposal more likely to be accepted.

How Well Do Proposals Work?

Some do, some don’t.

After a successful book, an author might just need to hand an editor a two-page proposal to get a contract. A new author might need to write an entire 100,000 word novel on spec. And everything in between happens in publishing. You’ll have to decide how much you want to do on spec and how solid your relationship is with your publisher. But keep in mind that as your career grows, your book proposals could shrink!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the animal sounds. Jeremy Doss, my nephew, is a talented film composer with experience in creating the musical moods needed to accompany and enhance images. A graduate of Film Score program an University of Southern California, he also writes music for video games and other uses.

We talked about what sort of music I needed and Jeremy was fantastic to work with. Contact him at jersam1995@sbcglobal.net

Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.

Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.

After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.

Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.

Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms

With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.

To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.

I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.

After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.

The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.

Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut on this site:

*|YouTube:uaUirE0ed6Y|*

TEACHERS: If your school blocks video through your server, please email me (darcy at darcypattison dot com) for a copy of the file to show to your class.

AUTHORS: Need more on how-to create book trailers? See my sister site www.booktrailermanual.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Books & Authors for the NonFiction Book Blast

I’m attending the June ALA conference and will be speaking on Sunday morning, along with nine other nonfiction authors. I’ve posted on the NonFiction Book Blast today, specifically telling more about writing Prairie Storms, but in general talking about the difference in writing fiction and nonfiction. PLEASE come by and comment!

Meanwhile, here’s a trailer for the event.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

When you write a nonfiction picture book, a biography (of any length) or other nonfiction topics, how much do you document? Do you use end notes, foot notes, or what?

Well-Documented Nonfiction Sells a Manuscript

Original Sources. You should use as many original or primary sources as possible. Go back to the original diary, the first photographs, the newspaper account of the time, letters, etc. I’m not talking here about how/where to research, but it’s worth saying that nonfiction for kids relied on original research.

The documentation of primary sources, though, is harder than with published resources. When I taught Freshman Composition, I told my students to put in more information than you think necessary. The main thing that documentation does is to let your reader know how they, too, might access that documentation to check your facts, or to dig deeper. If in doubt about “proper” documentation, look up the MLA or APA formats; my students liked using Easy Bib, an online service that will ask for infomation and return it properly formatted. If you are at a place where you can’t look it up, then record more than you think necessary. If you have found an original diary, then include everything you can about the diary: beginning date, ending date, # of entries, location that the diary was written, name of author, maiden name of women author, birth date and death date if available, and anything else about your access to it that seems important.

Be sure to document everything: written text, photographs, objects, film, recording, websites, multimedia, etc. Everything.

Writing the Manuscript. Make sure that as you write the manuscript, you are noting when and where you draw information from the source. I prefer to keep an ongoing bibliography and then follow the MLA format of adding the author’s last name and page number at the point where the info occurs.

Nonfiction should use original sources for information (Pattison).

Submitting the Manuscript. Ah, here’s where things get tricky. If you’re working with an editor and can ask preferences, do that. Endnote, footnote, in-text citation – it’s a matter of personal preference or house preference and should be followed if you know it.

If you don’t know, then pick one method that seems reasonable, given your topic and your research, and stick with it. Then, in the cover letter, explain what you’ve done. That’s it. Don’t stress out over this or try to go into too much explanation or apologize for the method of presentation. Just be straight forward about what you’ve done and if the publishing house is interested, they can ask you to re-format the revision a different way.

Creative Non-fiction. What if you write creative non-fiction and it reads like fiction and you don’t want those footnotes to interrupt the flow of the story. Then, you have two choices: the least intrusive method of documentation is end notes, where you put a super-numeral at the position the documentation is appropriate and at the end of a chapter or the end of the manuscript, you list the end notes.

OR, you can send in two versions of the manuscript, one with no documentation and one with documentation. That would give the editor the option of which to read and some editors would choose one, some the other.

Basically, do the original research, document the research, document the places in the manuscript where the documentation is used, and format either to an editor/publishing houses specifications, or if that is unknown, then the method that seems most reasonable. Then, submit.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Yesterday’s news was sad: PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.

NOTE: News has filtered down that the buying freeze applies to adult imprints, not the children’s imprints.

How Can Writers Survive in Slow Times

In light of our sluggish economy, how can writers still pay bills — make money? Of course, I’d like to become Famous Editor’s new best friend, sell five mss by January 1, receive calls asking me to write a great book on a fascinating topic (for a great advance), and so on. Not likely.

Instead, I will read Art and Fear yet again, and try these three ideas.

• Write Better. Emily van Beek, Kathi Appelt’s agent, said Appelt revised The Underneath eight times.

  Help is readily available. For example, my workbook on revision, Novel Metamorphosis, helps you diagnose problems, plan a revision in 8 strategic areas, and gives you tools to accomplish those revisions.

  Or take online classes, sign up for that MFA program you’ve been wanting to try, or give yourself an assignment to seek out information and learn learn new writing skills.

• Diversify. Look around for other writing opportunities such as writing newsletters and magazines: consider children’s magazines, parenting magazines, adult magazines. Publicize your public speaking to schools or organizations. Teach online, at a local community center, local university, or in your neighborhood.

  To find school visits, find resources such as Authors and Illustrators Who Visit Schools, and evaluate which meets your needs best.

  If you write fiction, try nonfiction. If you write nonfiction, look for new markets. Try writing a movie script.

• Maximize Your Writing Time. If you have to spend more time making money, consider maximizing your time for your own fiction/nonfiction by using things like Nanowrimo to keep you motivated to produce a lot in a short amount of time. Also check out their NanoFinMo (Finish Month) and other variations.
  (Of course, be sure to morph your fast writing into great writing with Novel Metamorphosis!)

Times are sluggish, but not desperate. I’m optimistic that books will be popular as Christmas gifts. I’m optimistic that the economy will turn around soon.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Sports books are action-oriented, fast-paced and full of memorable characters; but the core of a sports book–fiction or non-fiction–is people. Characters make sports interesting. Granted, these characters are constantly on the move and not inclined to deep musings about life. Yet, it is the character interacting with the unique aspects of a sports novel that keeps the reader interested.

Characters: Passion

When you think of sports characterization, think passion. Danny Walker is the basketball player in Mike Lupica’s 2004 title, Travel Team . During the whole first chapter, nine pages, Danny is busy with his evening ritual of practicing defense. He set up folding chairs and dribbles around them. He looks left, but passes the ball squarely to the seat of another folding chair. Lots of actions here, but the deep undercurrent of the chapter is disappointment. Danny didn’t make the “travel team,” and the reason given was, “You’re too small to play.”

The chapter is pure passion–emotion. Lupica never says that Danny was disappointed. But the actions, the ingrained habit of working at his sport, develop a depth of emotion that is rare in sports novels, really, in any book for boys.

It’s the first lesson of writing sports fiction or non-fiction : don’t be afraid of emotion. Lupica’s book hit the #1 spot on the New York Times Best Seller’s List, not because of reviews, but because of its popularity with kids. Lupica’s 2006 title, Heat , gives kids more dreams of glory, this time in baseball. In May, 2006 was at the #2 spot on the New York Times Best Seller’s List. Published by Philomel Books, Penguin Young Readers Group, these are middle grade literary fiction.

While Lupica begins with pure passion, the character arc, as played out on the field, is important. It’s a cliche that the underdog wins in the end, but writers can distinguish between success in sports and success in growing or maturing in some area. Act I sets up the unequal strengths or abilities of the protagonist and antagonist(s), and the antagonist has the upper hand. Act II has the protagonist learning the skills or character qualities needed to challenge the rival player or team. Act III delivers a final confrontation, and usually the protagonist and antagonist are more equally matched. The protagonist can win the sports rivalry, but that could be good or bad for their character-growth. Or, they can lose the sports rivalry, and that could be good or bad for their character-growth. That gives four options: Win Game/Lose Character, Win Game/Win Character, Lose Game/Lose Character, Lose Game/Win Character.

Even though it’s the most cliched option, Lupica delivers a Win Game/Win Character ending for Danny. It can be done, if the writing is strong enough to carry it. But don’t overlook the other options as a way to surprise your audience, yet still satisfy.

Characters: Action-Oriented

Defending Irene (Peachtree) by Kristin Wolden Nitz, is one of the lively new sports novels for girls. Nitz lived in Italy for three years and used that setting as a background to make her sports fiction stand out in the crowd. Irene was a good soccer player in the United States and when her family moved to Italy, she still expected to play. But in Italy, teams were for boys and she must earn her spot.

One problem common to sports novels is how to keep characterization strong, while dealing with action. Verbs are particularly important in action-oriented descriptions. It’s not enough to say, “I like the sound and feel of kicking a ball.” Nitz puts passion for a sport and action together as Irene thinks about soccer: “I love the sound and feel of the ball exploding off my foot.”

Avoid the “to be” verbs (is, are, has, had, was, am, etc.), in favor of more active verbs. Replace generic verbs with more specific ones. These sentences demonstrate the progression from general to specific action verbs:

The boy ran across the field.
The boy dashed across the field.

The second one gives the reader a more exact image of what is happening.

For the strongest communication, don’t add adverbs or other modifiers, until you have the most exact verb possibly.

Not: The boy ran quickly across the field.
But: The boy dashed wildly across the field.

Of course, sometimes “to be” verbs are exactly what you need. Use good judgment, but push active verbs whenever possible.

Character: Fast-Paced

Another special problem with sports writing is pacing. Obviously, you can’t give a play-by-play of an entire basketball game. Sometimes, you have to speed up time and summarize as Lupica does describing one game: “Matt picked up his fourth foul halfway through the third quarter. . .” (P. 221) That nicely takes care of half of the third quarter in only half a sentence. The key here is focus. The important thing was that Matt was in foul trouble and we didn’t need to know the rest of that quarter’s action.

On the other hand, at the big moment, you need to slow down action, expand and let it take up more space, so it feels big. Lupica slows down time for Danny: “He pushed off on his left leg, going up hard but laying the ball up there soft. He saw the ball hit the square as if there were a bull’s eye painted on it.” (P. 226) This extra detail lets the moment grow in the reader’s perception, creating ups and downs of reaction. At tension-filled moments, good pacing makes the reader wait to know the outcome.

Full of Characters: Teams and Crowds

Crowd scenes are one of the major problems with sports novels. Often, there’s a large audience and there’s an opposing team. Both need to be described in memorable, yet concise ways. Nitz says, “I always remember that there’s twenty-two people on a soccer field and many more on the sidelines. It’s so important to introduce each new character with a special, memorable scene that will cement that person’s role in the readers’ head.”

The scene usually anchored in the sport. Here’s how Nitz give Irene her first good look at her future antagonist:

A boy with curly black hair, surprisingly blue eyes, and a determined chin was dribbling at top speed. He dashed at players head-on and then cut left or right. I heard boys call out his name in protest: “Matteo!” He was as graceful and gorgeous as Bernini’s statue of David, but he could move like a racehorse.

In Defending Irene, Nitz names only one opposing player in the entire book, because he is the “dangerous player.” For less dangerous, but still important members of the opposition, Nitz often uses jersey numbers: Number 54 hit a three-pointer.

Using the jargon of a particular sport can also help distinguish and characterize characters. For example, you might call one soccer player, “the keeper,” because he’s the goalie. Use that characteristic and make the Keeper a bit of a pack-rat, too, who always has things in his pockets. It’s a small thing but helps the reader track the characters better.

Zooms, pans and scans can also help with crowd scenes. For a zoom, think of pulling in close on a player’s hands holding a basketball. The reader sees the splint around the jammed left pointer-finger, the hang nails, the carefully-printed kid’s name written on the ball in a statement of proud ownership. Zooms thrive on such carefully observed details.

For panoramas, or pans, on the other hand, think of sitting at the top of the bleachers and the football field is laid out in front of you. You get the wider view of the parking lot with the school buses parked in a row, the bright lights shining down on the stadium, the pageantry of colors as the cheerleaders and band welcome the football team onto the field, the swaths of color for each team. With the emphasis on Show-don’t-Tell, writers often rely too heavily on the zoom. The pan offers an alternative focal length with unique opportunities to pull back and set up the environment in which this character operates. What are the larger issues that affect the character? Where do you want your reader to focus their attention?

A final tool for crowd work is the scan. Crowd scenes often are generic: “The crowd was hungry for a score.” With a scan, the writer gives short, intensive zooms on a series of people. Zoom in rapid succession on the quarterback lunging forward to pass; his mother taping the pass play with a digital video camera she bought two hours earlier and maxed out her credit card to buy; the quarterback’s girlfriend–the head cheerleader–chewing on the fingernail of her little finger and not even noticing the taste of red fingernail polish; and the coach writing on his clipboard the quarterback’s name alternately with the second-string quarterback’s name, until the pass is overthrown and he circles one of the names. Suddenly, the crowd is more layered and undercurrents are exposed–all with a simple scan.

Characters: Non-fiction

Sports non-fiction includes how-to-play, trivia, statistics or sports history. There opportunities for writers here. For example, some of the non-fiction series for girls were published in the late 1990s, and could be due for updates. But by and large, sports non-fiction is dominated by characters, too, this time in the form of biographies.

For example, Matt Christopher adds to his Legends in Sports series from Little Brown with titles on Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. The Amazing Athletes series from Lerner adds 2006 titles on David Ortiz, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Freddy Adu, LeBron James, Michael Vick, Sammy Sosa, and Travis Pestrama.

As with fiction, these people are interesting because of the obstacles they have overcome, the passion they display for the sport, and how the sport affected their lives. In short, characterization. It might take research and interviews, but the same qualities in sports fiction can be used in sports non-fiction. Look for places where you can demonstrate a person’s passion. Activate the prose with good verbs.

Unless you describe a particular game, pacing will be more in terms of the player’s career. When and why did they play well? Why did their game fall off for a while? Look for motivations as places to slow down the pacing and give a detailed account. Panoramas of a season can give the player’s success and defeats a context.

Zooms, pans and scans can also help you write about the people surrounding the player. Teammates and family members can be presented in a scan that helps focus on a point you are making.

Most of all, in sports fiction or non-fiction, find the passion. Here’s how Nitz has Irene explain her sport: “Dad had passed his passion for soccer along to me. I loved it!”

Read more 15 Days to a Stronger Character.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win