Now in its 12th year, STORY WEEK ran March 16 through the 21st. I was in Chicago to see the amazing Edward Hopper exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago and was also able to attend five of the Story Week sessions. This year, they featured Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, ZZ Packer, and Aimee Bender (among many other writers), plus they had an ex-cellent lecture and two panel discussions (with large and small house editors, an independent book seller, several pub-lished authors, a writer consultant, and a Booklist editor) on how to get published and how the publishing world works.

PUBLISHING BOOT CAMP

The most information-packed session on publishing was given by Marcela Landres, an editorial consultant who formerly worked for seven years as an editor at Simon and Schuster. She knows how the publishing world works, how editors and agents think, and she gave a ‘Boot Camp’ session to bring writers up to speed.

Her primary message to unpublished writers was to be smart about the business and to build a platform before they send queries out to publishers or agents (see sidebar on steps to do this). She stressed that to be badly published (wrong agent sells your work to publisher who is a bad fit who poorly positions and promotes your book that then disappears af-ter a couple of months) is almost worse than being unpublished.

Marcela had several other pieces of advice that were fresh and helpful:

1. Subscribe to the $20/month “Publishers Lunch” (www.publishersmarketplace.com) for just one month. This allows you to search the archives of deals in the publishing world for agents representing work like yours, and to see who is selling to the publishing houses where you think your work will find a good home. After the month is up and you’ve made your list cancel your subscription.

2. An agent does NOT have to be in New York City in order to be a good agent. There are many BAD agents in NYC.

3. Smaller publishing houses will promote you and your book for the life of your book. The larger houses toss your con-tact information after one year. They promote your book for the first month, maybe the first few months, but if it doesn’t take off, they bail.

4. Her biggest push during Boot Camp was for new writers to build their platform.

5. Realize that when you sign your first book deal, your work is only half done. The other half is you promoting the hell out of your book. Here advice was to: get a plan, get a website, do readings anywhere you can, and use your advance money (at least some of it) to promote your book. (* In another session, it was noted that publishers send only about 10% of their authors on book tours, and there are 300,000 books published annually in the U.S.!)

This is Marcela’s third time at Story Week. There is a wealth of information on her website, especially under the ‘RESOURCE’ heading at www.marcelalandres.com, and she is also available for hire as an individual consultant.

'This is supplied as information, not an endorsement'

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