Setting, Scenes and Book Signings

Jean Hegland

I have mentioned before on this blog how much I enjoy belonging to a writers club. It is the process of interacting with others who share my obsession with the written word that inspires the creative flame within me.

This past weekend my club sponsored the second of three editing workshops and had its monthly meeting.

So I saw writing friends and colleagues on both Saturday and Sunday. On the drive home Sunday night I felt euphoric.

Things had gone fabulously and I had some incredible new insights that will inform my future writing and that I wanted to share with my blog readers.

Jean Hegland, author of Into the Forest, led a workshop regarding the importance of setting. She began with the situation of a person waking up from a coma and that the first thing they would ask is, "Where am I?"

That is the question that a writer needs to answer when they begin a story or a scene so that the reader will know whether it is day or night, what season, what year, whether it is indoors or outdoors and where this scene takes place geographically. Because each choice has an impact on the overall story.

Setting gives a story verisimilitude when it takes readers to a place they have not been before or if it is to a place in which they are familiar. It is vitally important to get the details right for if you choose a real location and say you put a grocery store on the wrong side of the road, those who know the area will complain.

Jean then gave an example of how important it is choosing settings for individual scenes and how by playing with your choices you can change the tone and meaning of a scene.

She referenced Jordan Rosenfeld's earlier workshop about scenes and Jordan's insistence that a scene not be comprised of "talking heads in space" and that each scene involve some action. Then Jean gave an example of an action such as a couple having sex where the setting chosen would reveal character.

The actions by the characters could be written the same, but depending on the setting the meaning and the tone of the scene would be different.

The following were the three different settings she used to illustrate her point:

1) a cemetery (ewwww)
2) a bedroom
3) a boardroom

During that discussion I could not help but blurt out my "ewwww" comment in the class, which led to a nice round of laughter from the group. Camaraderie among writers is a wonderful thing.

Jordan Rosenfeld

Now onto the subject of scenes which was Jordan Rosenfeld's topic. She described scenes as the building blocks of a story similar to beads on a wire. Meaning that each scene needs to be complete in and of itself and it is the stringing together of the scenes that create the overall story.

Each scene should be comprised of:

action
character
POV (point of view) in which the scene is communicated
new information revealed
conflict and drama
and it must take place in a tangible setting

In other words: No talking heads in space!

She also stressed that not only is the first scene in your book important to hook your readers, but that as each character of any relevance is introduced that you must take the time to recognize that this is their first scene. Writers must reveal something compelling about each important new character without resorting to a data dump summary.

Jordan feels that it is better to give such information via dialogue and action than by summary. Ye olde "show don't tell" maxim.

She described dramatic tension as a sense of danger, complexity, mystery and a sense of discovery. Each scene should have some dramatic tension. She also stressed the need for variety in the style of scenes so that there are peaks and valleys in the tempo or else the reader will become either fatigued or bored.

Plot is created in relationship to the scenes. She gave a list of 4 D's for plot revelation that each scene must include at least one of these:

Dialogue
Discovery
Demonstration (such as a flash of unexpected anger)
Devices - e.g. letters or memorabilia

She described a well balanced scene as one where the reader is:

not confused
knows the setting
knows the characters
there is tension and drama

The time to change a scene is denote a break with time, place or POV. That can be done with a full chapter break or by using a blank space within a chapter to signify the change.

For those interested in knowing more about Jordan's thoughts on scenes, you can buy her excellent book Make a Scene

by Writers Digest Books at your local bookstore or available online.

Then on Sunday at the monthly meeting of my writers club we had Stephanie Deignan the events coordinator of Copperfield's Books come and speak.

Stephanie Deignan

For several years now I had wanted to schedule a speaker who could give the bookstore's point of view in regard to author appearances. I had approached two other events coordinators in the past to give such a talk, but they declined. So I was excited when last summer I spoke with Stephanie on the phone and she accepted.

I wanted our members to know how to go about getting an event scheduled, what to expect in regard to publicizing from the bookstore, and what their responsibilities are in order to have a successful event.

Stephanie started by saying that we should all be aware that bookstores are understaffed and underpaid and so when you approach a bookseller in the hopes of arranging a signing, you need to be understanding and patient. The information that you need is to discover the name of the events coordinator, their phone number and email address. Do not bother the harried bookseller with the information about you or your book as it will probably get lost in the shuffle.

In your initial contact via phone (most likely a voice mail message) and email you should include your name, your contact information, the title of your book, the publisher information, give a brief synopsis about what the book is about, any publicity information such as radio interviews scheduled, any published reviews, as well as book distribution information. Mention if it is carried by Ingram, Baker and Taylor or a smaller independent publishing distributor or if it is a POD title (print on demand) which would necessitate being on consignment.

Then be patient and wait for a few days or so to hear back. Be professional and be willing to call back if necessary. Again, they are short staffed and bookstore employees are trying their best.

Stephanie at some point discussed the difficulty bookstores have with PODs titles because generally they are non-returnable. Bookstores will order POD titles for customers if it is paid at the time of ordering, but they do not want to be stuck with books they cannot return and might never be able to sell.

The different kinds of author events were described as "traditional author talks" where an author talks about their book, does a short reading, a question and answer session and then signs books versus "meet and greets" where a table is set up and an author can interact with customers in a more informal setting and talk one on one instead of to a group.

She said that for authors who are not yet established would find it easier to have a "meet and greet" scheduled than an "author talk." If for no other reason than it causes less havoc for booksellers since they do not have to rearrange the bookshelves in the store to make room for chairs for people who may or may not show up to the signing.

She admitted that the emphasis that bookstores give to publicizing their author events is tiered depending on the name recognition of the authors. Those who are big named authors are given "A list" treatment and more time is spent on trying to generate crowds. Then publicizing for "B list" and "C list" authors are by necessity given less time and energy. This comes back to the reality of being understaffed.

That means that a large onus of publicizing the events rests on the shoulders of authors. Once you have a scheduled event, you must do as much to publicize as you can by utilizing the old tried and true methods of fliers, posters, and postcards, as well as newer media such as online events calendars, keeping an up-to-date website with your events listings, and social media such as Facebook and blogs.

She also stressed the influence that radio interviews can have in making the events a success. If you should be lucky enough to score a radio interview with someone like Michael Krasny of KQED Radio - who has an audience known for being book buying fiends - be sure to let a bookstore know so that they can buy adequate stock. Recently an author returned for a signing and after having been interviewed on Krasny's show and he drew a significantly larger crowd than the had the year before with a previous title. The problem was that the publicist did not alert the store and there were not enough books on hand to meet demand.

Which is why authors should always carry at least a box of books with them to signings...just in case. You never know when a bookstore's order might not come through on time due to blizzards in the midwest or strikes by UPS, etc.

(A few side notes: if you are lucky enough to score a radio interview prior to a book signing, do not forget to mention your scheduled book store event including the date, time and location. That is what will bring people into the store and get their butts in the seats for your signing! And if you want to know more about what to expect with talk radio and radio interviews you can read an old post of mine on the subject of the Do's and Don'ts of Talk Radio.)

On the day of your event you should call the store early in the day to confirm, arrive early and check in with a bookseller. You should bring a sign up sheet for those who would like to be on your mailing list as well as fliers to any upcoming events such as workshops or conferences. You should also bring postcards with the cover of your book, business cards and even book marks with your website and blog addresses. Make it easy for people who are interested in you to follow your career.

Stephanie suggested an event drawing between five to ten people for small authors is doing good. She also said that if there is a ratio of 30%-50% of books sold to the number of attendees present than it is a successful signing.

During the discussion with our members, Persia Woolley mentioned another reason for authors to always be prepared. One time she went to a signing and the author never showed. The audience was getting restless and being a trooper - she offered to pitch in and give a talk about her book. The events coordinator was thrilled to have someone save the day and she had the opportunity to talk to an audience she otherwise would not have had.

Stephanie thought that was great of Persia to help out in that manner.

Persia then said that the favor wound up being returned by another author when she got lost trying to find a small venue. She arrived late after finally getting directions from someone at a gas station and discovered that another author had warmed up the crowd in the interim. (Another reason for authors to keep a box of books in the trunk of your car. You just never know when you will get a chance to sign and sell them!)

Stephanie was asked about timing of when to start trying to schedule events at bookstores and she thought that two months before publication would be a good time to start. Then on the other end is how long you have before the books start getting returned. That happens at about three months post publication for hardcovers and six months for everything else. So after about a year of publication unless your book has really taken off, it will be hard to interest a bookstore in doing an event.

Her last words of wisdom on the subject was to enjoy yourself and make it fun.

Confessions of a Former Bookseller, Part III

My intentions with this blog is to put forth my thoughts about writing/publishing and my love of drama. My goal is to update it at least weekly in the new year.

There are still some gems of knowledge that I gleaned from working at a bookstore that I feel I should share. So until I exhaust that theme, here's part III in my series of Confessions of a Former Book Seller:

In defense of a good spine

I believe a book's spine is more important than its cover.

I don't want to diminish the power of good cover art, or wonderful hooks and blurbs on back covers that entice readers to crack open books to read the contents. Nope. I'm saying that if the spine is lousy, the cover art won't have a chance to work its magic.

That's because most books are not placed "face out" on book shelves. They are instead placed with their spines out. If your book has a bad spine, it'll never get picked off the shelf.

You not only have to have a compelling title that will intrigue someone who is browsing the book shelves, you also need to make sure they can read the title.

When I worked as a bookseller, I saw a lot of bad examples of how not to create a book. The worst I remember was a book that had a white cover with pink italic script. I remember picking up that book and laughing with other booksellers in the back room about it. We weren't laughing at the book's content, but rather the fact that no one would be able see the name of the book on its spine or its cover.

I mean, what where they thinking when they picked that combination? Did the author want the book to match her favorite dress? And on a field of white? Then there was the italics. That font should only be used on front covers and only in subtitles. It should never be on a spine, because the reader is trying to read titles sideways, please don't make it any harder on them than it already is. The longer the book length, the wider your spine will be and you should try to make the font of the title as big and as bold as possible. You want your book to stand out from all of the competing titles on the shelf and scream, "LOOK AT ME! PICK ME!"

Part of what makes a good spine is contrast in color. You need to have the text stand out from the background color of the cover. A friend of mine has a book that graces my shelf which unfortunatetly does not follow that simple rule. The background color is blue and the text is black. If I didn't know what to look for, I would have a hard time finding it on my shelf. That's because it is almost camouflaged and my eye automatically jumps to spines that are easier to read.

Try your own experiment and look at the books on your shelf. See which ones you can read with ease and from the average distance you would stand away from a shelf at a bookstore. Find out what you think works best and what is difficult to read. Also remember that as people age, their eyesight isn't what it used to be and the larger the font the easier it is to read.

And please, do not go for saddle stitching. Unless your book is for arts and crafts and destined to be sold in risers or spinners in specialty markets, it is the death knell to go for a staple to be your spine. The same goes for spiral binding. Just don't.

If you can't read the book's title when it's on the shelf then it is doomed to gather dust there. No one will pick it off the shelf either to buy it, or a bookseller to return it. Instead, your pride and joy will be destined to remain unloved on the shelf like a forgotten toy.

I would have thought that these concepts about having a spine with a good contrast would be common sense. However, I have brought this subject up at writers conferences and most recently at a meeting of my writers club and you'd have thought that I had just given them a revelation from on high from the reactions I got from people.

So please while obsessing about what images you want to have gracing your cover, I humbly implore you to spend a little time thinking about your spine as well.

Confessions of a Former Bookseller, Part II

If you haven’t read part I, please scroll down and read that entry first.

I was not your average bookseller. No, when I was hired I was given the responsibility of being in charge of customer special orders. The Barnes and Noble chain had decided to try and do everything they could to get any book in print into a customer’s hands.

Our store was one of twelve alpha sites for the program. When our doors opened in November 1994, we were one of the first to see how it would work. I helped develop the manual that was used to train all the other superstores when the program went nationwide.

Essentially when a book wasn’t in our store that a customer wanted, a bookseller would order it for them. Our computerized ordering system would connect at the end of each day to a series of book distributors such as: Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Book People and Pacific Pipeline. Included in the day's orders were replacement copies for the store for those books which were “modeled,” specific requests by managers for hot trends and customer orders.

(Side bar about book which were “modeled.” Those books are backlist titles which have a proven sales record. That could be anything from “Huckleberry Finn” and “What Color is Your Parachute?” to “Calvin and Hobbes.” The home office determined how many copies of a specific title a store should have on hand. For example, we had probably about 10 copies of “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron on our shelf. Whenever we sold a copy, the computer automatically ordered a replacement copy so we would maintain a stock of ten copies of that title.

New books are not modeled. So you can have a new celebrity kiss-and-tell book released with great fanfare and three months later it is returned to the publisher and on the bargain table in six months and never makes it as a coveted backlist title.

In the publishing business there’s a phrase known as “gone today, here tomorrow” referring to books being returned from the bookstores. The goal for authors should be not only great initial sales at time of publication, but long-term interest from the book buying public to make your revenue stream come years after you finished writing your masterpiece.)

How the process worked

I would get a list generated each day of titles that failed in the ordering process. That none of the book distributors were able to fulfill our request. My job was to see if those books were available directly from the publisher.

I took that sheet of paper which sometimes had 80 or so books on it and go up to a terminal with Bowker’s Book in Print and find out who was the publisher for each individual book. Then I’d write down their contact information.

Once I had my list then I’d try to see if there were any publishers who had more than one book that I needed to call about. I mean, why call Little, Brown and Co. three times when you could call them once and ask about three titles?

I learned a lot about publishers in this process. I hear people at writers conferences and at meetings complaining that there are only five or six major publishing houses who make all the decisions about what to publish.

Nonsense. There are a lot more publishers than that.

I worked at that job for a little over two years and I had filled two entire rolodexes with cards and contact information of publishers. Some were behemoths with multiple imprints, and others were “mom and pop” operations. There were also many medium sized publishers including university presses who produced wonderful books. One of my favorite smaller publishers is Ten Speed Press.

The one publisher that I developed an intense dislike for was AMS Press. That was because they were just incredibly and intolerably rude to me. I could never figure that out. Here I was calling them because someone wanted to buy one of their books and they were always be snide and rude.

It was an interesting job because many of my preconceived assumptions simply did not hold up. I had expected that any title from the bigger publishers that weren’t available from the distributors and still in print would not be available from the publisher directly. Not so. I ordered books all the time from Random House, Harper Collins, St. Martin’s Press, Warner Books, etc. It surprised me, but what the heck I got our customers the book they wanted.

The Process of going “Out of Print”

I had been told by my manager to expect that mass market paperbacks if they weren’t available from our distributors were most likely out of print. That’s because her thought was that many titles have a short shelf life. If they don’t sell, they become strip returns and then go “out of print.”

I found her perception to be inadequate to describe the process. An unavailable mass market title from a major publisher would go through the following steps:

1. Out of stock. (It might be pending a reprint or not. That information was not known. Although sometimes they would give a date and that generally meant that there was a pending reprint although the order was always subject to cancellation.)

2. Out of stock – no date. Similar to #1 but given a different status.

3. Out of stock indefinitely.

4. Out of print.

It didn’t matter whether or not the status was due to reason 1-4, the end result was that I could not get them their book. I would make my publisher calls up until 2 pm which was 5 pm Eastern time because most of the major publishers were on the east coast. So it was later in the day I would call to give people bad news calls. The only ray of hope I could leave them was by giving the name of other book stores in town who did “out of print” searches. I pimped those bookstores multiple times on a daily basis in the hopes that our customers would find what they needed.

I found that more than mass market novels that the kind of books that had a shelf life nearing that of cottage cheese were computer manuals. Because technology evolves so quickly that computer programs are almost obsolete by the time they reach the market. Making their companion manuals just as time sensitive. We would get calls from customers who had gotten hand-me-down computers from friends or relatives and were looking for computer manuals to go along with their out-of-date programs. Those people were always out of luck. That cottage cheese had turned sour about a year or two earlier and would never come ‘round again.

Hot titles being out of stock

On the other end of the spectrum were “hot titles” that were out of stock nationwide because the publishers had not printed enough books to meet demand. The distributors had none left and the publishers were trying desperately to get another printing into distribution as quickly as possible.

I remember several hot titles where it would be literally over a month before our backorders got filled. So trying to order them directly from the publisher didn’t work either. And unfortunately some customers would get really snitty when we couldn’t get them their books in those cases. I remember a few of them saying that B. Dalton had copies, why didn’t we? They didn’t want to buy it at B. Dalton because they wanted our discount, but we didn’t have a copy so what good did it do to complain to us? Honestly, we weren’t trying to withhold any titles from people due to a political conspiracy.

Eeeeeegads. Sometimes dealing with the public can be a challenge.

Now, with all the online book dealers who are vendors for Barnes and Noble.com I pretty certain they have disbanded the publisher order program. Because it was a lot of work and now people can go online themselves try to find titles themselves and purchase used or out of print books online.

More observations to come.

Confessions of a Former Bookseller, Part I

I used to work as a bookseller for Barnes and Noble.

Yes, I did. Go ahead and start throwing rotten tomatoes and telling me how I should have worked for an independent bookstore instead.

Get it out of your system.

I admit that I worked for one of the Eeeevil national chains parodied in the movie You’ve Got Mail as Fox and Sons.

Some of the observations that I made as a bookseller at a major national chain might not hold true if I had worked at a local indy, therefore as budding novelist, I’m glad I worked at B&N. I think some of the observations may also prove helpful to other writers who would like to see their work carried in major chains across the country as well as indies.

I worked at B&N from 1994-1996 prior to the true rise of the internet. By the time I left, Amazon.com was just in its infancy and B&N did not have email access for their stores, nor was there a Barnes and Noble.com – so some of the information is dated, but I think it will still prove illuminating.

How the stores are structured

I was one of the original store hires and so I was there when the store was still devoid of inventory. We had to start from nothing to over 100,000 books on the shelves categorized and alphabetized in about four weeks time. It seemed like a task worthy of Hercules.

The store was color coded by departments and each department had its own supervisor and crew was assigned to shelve that area.

Orange: Children’s

Green: Bestsellers and bargain books

Pink: Self-help books, (popular psychology, as well as psychology text books), motivational titles, health, games and puzzles, humor, field guides, travel and cook books

Yellow: business titles, legal reference, history, religion, philosophy

Blue: fiction, reference books, foreign language, drama, poetry, anthologies, art books, How-to manuals for car repair, gardening, woodworking, needlepoint

I remember exactly the floor plan of how the store looked when we opened, and they’ve changed things since then a few times over. I don’t know if any of those color designations still hold or if the home office had decided to tinker with what was in pink vs. blue departments.

The important part of the color designation was when the books were delivered. We had several days when entire UPS trucks delivered their contents to us and we would be like the proverbial fire brigade chain setting the boxes of books in the middle of the store. All the boxes came from Ingram, and it was considered to be the Superstore start up kit.

One of the assistant managers would open a box and yell out the various colors and people would then take the box and move it to a pile. Later we would be opening the boxes and separating them for their various appropriate shelves.

After the segregation and categorizing came the alphabetizing. All with the opening date looming.

The night before we opened to the general public we had a fête for the employees and guests. Several people wore tuxedoes, and we had food and wine. It was a glorious night. I was showing my husband around and took him to the receiving room and I saw one of the supervisors doing something that I will never forget.

She was stripping the covers off of paperbacks for the first strip return.

We had not even opened our doors to the public, but we were obligated by the home office to strip the covers off books and destroy the printed content. Because the strip returns were generated on a nation wide computer system and they did not distinguish between existing stores and new ones.

Our store was opening a week before the Thanksgiving holidays and the beginning of the Christmas book buying season, and yet we still had to destroy books that we worked to get in the store and alphabetize. Books that no consumer ever had the opportunity to purchase.

I thought of it as being sacrilegious. That was just my first observation of how corporate mentality is not necessarily predicated on logic or common sense.

There are more similar observations to follow.