In the past several months I’ve been on more than a few webinars and teleseminars in which coaches and authors are claiming to have the secrets to being a bestseller, or even claiming that their books are bestsellers. Because I have access to a tool called Bookscan that gives sales data, I’ve checked sales figures on these so-called bestsellers and found myself dismayed by the numbers—not because I have a judgment that they’ve been low, but because I can’t wrap my mind around how someone can claim to have a bestseller when there is evidence that said book has not sold particularly well.

I’m really not trying to burst these coaches’ and authors’ bubbles as much as I would like them to understand that using the term bestseller for a book that is not undermines and discredits real bestsellers, and it’s misleading to the general public.

Wikipedia states:

A book that is identified as a “bestseller” greatly improves its chance of selling to a much wider audience. In this way, bestseller has taken on its own popular meaning, rather independent of empirical data, by becoming a compromised product category and, in effect, attempting to create a marketing image. For example, a “summer bestseller” is usually determined long before the summer is over, and signals a book’s suitability for millions of lounging pool-side readers.

A bestseller, by definition, is quantified by its sales. Sales figures are gathered from a number of bookstore and other sales reports. Part of the confusion may be that there are national, regional, and specialty lists. Add to that Amazon’s list, which is based only on sales from its own site (which they update every hour). So lots of authors can claim to be Amazon bestsellers, if only for the hour during which they sent everyone they know to buy their book. Sending everyone you know to Amazon at the same time is actually a good strategy to bump yourself to the top of their rankings, but I don’t think it should automatically qualify a book as a bestseller.

Having had the privilege of working with New York Times bestseller Mark Nepo, while he was riding the New York Times list for his Book of Awakening a few times during 2011 and 2012, I know that the weekly point-of-sale numbers were in the thousands week in and week out. On the weeks he climbed onto the New York Times list, his book was selling near 10,000 copies a week. In a climate where a book is considered successful if it sells 5,000 copies over the course of its entire shelf life, you can see how 10,000 in one week should put you on the bestseller list—and especially the list to trump all other lists. And yes, today it does mean more than ever to be a New York Times bestseller rather than just a bestseller, which is why you consistently see authors claiming this accreditation.

Maggie Galehouse wrote on her blog Bookish that “the first bestseller list was created in 1895 by a trade magazine called The Bookman. Publishers Weekly started a list in 1912, the New York Times in 1942. Now, every major publication has some sort of list.” And perhaps this very fact—that every major publication has some sort of list—is at the root of the term’s dilution. It’s funny because, in general, I’m a believer of breaking down barriers to entry. When it comes to publishing, I’ve written a lot about not letting the gatekeepers (agents and editors) determine your worth or worthiness, but when it comes to claiming bestseller status, I want authors to stop using the term as a measure of their own book’s success when there are no sales numbers to back up the claim.

I suppose one could argue that today being a New York Times bestseller is the new indicator of bestseller-dom. The New York Times bestseller list is the preeminent list when it comes to bestselling books in the U.S. According to Wikipedia, however, the exact methodology they use to create the list is classified as a trade secret.

Book Review staff editor Gregory Cowles explained the method “is a secret both to protect our product and to make sure people can’t try to rig the system. Even in the Book Review itself, we don’t know (the news surveys department’s) precise methods.

I in fact contacted someone (a colleague of a friend of an author) at the Times to comment for this post, but he declined, stating that his opinion about what I was writing about had nothing to do with how the Times determines a bestseller. Of course, that’s not what I was asking for. After all, if you go onto www.nytimes.com you can easily read their methodology, despite it being classified as a “trade secret,” basically because this is a very vague description of how they gather their information:

The appearance of a ranked title reflects the fact that sales data from reporting vendors has been provided to The Times and has satisfied commonly accepted industry standards of universal identification (such as ISBN13 and EISBN13 codes). Publishers and vendors of all ranked titles conformed in timely fashion to The New York Times Best Seller Lists requirement to allow for independent corroboration of sales for that week.

The Times’ current categories for bestsellers are vast and varied. A look at this week’s list shows the following categories: combined print & e-book fiction; combined print & e-book nonfiction; hardcover fiction; hardcover nonfiction; paperback trade fiction; Paperback Mass-Market Fiction; Paperback Nonfiction; E-Book Fiction; E-Book Nonfiction; Paperback Advice & Misc.; Children’s Picture Books; Children’s Chapter Books; Children’s Paperback Books; Children’s Series; Hardcover Graphic Books; Paperback Graphic Books; Manga; Combined Hardcover & Paperback Fiction; Combined Hardcover & Paperback Nonfiction.

Who knew manga was a dedicated category? This might be an opportunity for some ambitious authors out there since the less competition you have in your category, the easier it is to get onto a bestseller list. Just saying.

Meanwhile, I did find an interesting but old article from the Midwest Book Review, by Dan Poynter, who wrote:

But most books are not sold through bookstores. Even if you move a million books via mail-order distribution, you won’t make a bestseller list. On the other hand, you may calculate that your book is the bestselling book in its field and there is no reason you can’t mention this in your advertising. For example, Parachuting Manual with Log [now out of print] is the bestselling skydiving book of all time with over 500,000 sold.

Dan Poynter’s book on hang gliding went through the press ten times in ten years (it was revised with each printing) for 130,000 in print. That comes out to 13,000 copies sold each year—not enough to make a bestseller list. But that book allowed Dan to move back to California and buy a home in Santa Barbara.

I appreciate Poynter’s take here, as it applies to books today, because yes, there are vast numbers of books sold through non-retail outlets, and sure, a book that’s sold 130,000 books over the course of its lifetime deserves accolades. But does it deserve to be called a bestseller because the author calculates that it’s the bestselling book in its field? I don’t think it does.

Part of what bothers me about this desire authors have to slap the bestseller label on their own books is that it’s arbitrary and there’s no way to prove sales numbers outside of Bookscan, which claims to measure only 70% of all sales. In a culture where people are always trying to out-best each other, claiming bestseller status when you’re not is the equivalent of telling people you were a valedictorian when you were not, or that you got your MBA from an Ivy League when you did not. To me it’s something that certain books achieve (for better or worse), and no author, just because they want to look good, should be able to co-opt just because. And yet it happens every day. Which circles back around to the reason this post is stemming from my being fed up.

In conclusion, I’d like to make a case for adopting a whole new term, which tells the world that a book kicks ass without claiming that it’s a bestseller. We have this for movies. It’s called a blockbuster. A blockbuster is a term for a movie that’s popular or successful, but it doesn’t claim to be the top-grossing film of the year, because we have measures for these things that don’t translate to the book world.

I’d also like to acknowledge each and every author out there for their very awesome achievement to have written a whole book and then have gotten it published—whether you published on a major trade house or self-published. It’s a feat. It’s on countless people’s bucket lists. It’s freaking hard as hell and requires so much of you! I understand this now more than ever as I round the homestretch into finishing my own first book. None of us has to co-opt the word bestseller in order to make ourselves look good. We can all feel awesome about what we’ve created and produced regardless. And honestly, even if you don’t think a certain book—or books, look at Fifty Shades of Gray, Fifty Shades of Darker, and Fifty Shades of Freed taking the one, two, three slots this week!—deserves to be a bestseller, well, suck it up. You only have to support the authors you want to read. After all, those of us who love good books are always going to find them, and knowing there’s a readership for our books and going after those readers is really what we should be focused on when we’re doing our marketing and thinking about all the ways to reach our readers.

It’s not possible to write a post that expresses the mixed emotions I feel as I prepare to leave Seal Press at the end of this month and strike out on my own to grow Warner Coaching. I am thrilled and ready, eager and proud, and sad and nostalgic all at once. Seal has given me more than I ever could have imagined possible, but the drive to do my own thing has been an undeniable force, buoying me even in moments when I’ve felt like I must be crazy to leave such a good thing.

Seal Press has been so much more than a job for me. Seal was born in 1976, the same year as me. Before I started working at Seal I didn’t even consider myself a feminist. I was one of those, “I’m not a feminist, but . . .” people. Oh, what I didn’t know!! Today, I am a proud feminist. I have learned so much from Seal. It’s shaped me and made me a more conscious person. I’ve learned important lessons and sometimes hard lessons. I’ve had the great privilege of shepherding so many wonderful authors’ books into print, and I’m blessed today to count many of those authors as my dear friends.

Seal has such an important mission, to inform women’s lives. The women who work there are passionate advocates of women, and the books we publish—the books I’ve had the great honor to acquire into the program—help, inspire, move, and, most important, tell the truth of women’s experiences. When I look at the books in this banner (from Seal’s Facebook page—like it!), I well up because every one of those books has a story, a wonderful author or authors attached to it, and exists because Seal continues to take risks and publish such smart books.

Seal has given me another important gift in that it brought me my lovely and talented wife, Krista Lyons, who will remain at the helm of the program as its thoughtful and wise publisher. Beyond sharing a love for books and publishing, Krista and I together have loved and fostered and grown Seal Press over these seven-and-a-half years. I’m grateful to her for everything she’s taught me and for everything she’s brought to my life (our 3 boys being by far the number one most rewarding and amazing gift, and Seal ranking a not-too-distant second).

To my team at Seal, thank you. To my former team at North Atlantic Books, thank you, too. Richard Grossinger taught me how to acquire books, and I am grateful to him for mentoring me in a process you cannot learn in school—a feeling for what makes a book work and what makes a book publishable.

I have been in a rather enviable position these thirteen years, having the awesome job of working as a gatekeeper and a decider. And yet, interestingly, what I most love about my coaching practice is helping those writers who aren’t shoo-ins and who haven’t figured out how to penetrate what can sometimes feel like a 100-foot steel barricade. Publishing is like a labyrinth, and I enjoy the challenges and love the opportunities it provides people. I also love what it’s becoming as it changes. I like that the barriers to entry are lower than they’ve been. I like that self-publishing is both a more viable option than ever and something whose stigma, as far as I can tell, has nearly vanished.

I feel equally privileged to work with my clients at Warner Coaching as I do with the most high-profile authors I’ve worked with at Seal and North Atlantic, some of whom have been bestsellers, a handful of whom are quite famous in their own right. But at the end of the day, everyone who’s aspiring to write a book has something to say—and I’ve been moved to tears by writing that will never go on to be published on a traditional press, and been educated by authors who have no platform to speak of. So I see it as my calling to help writers figure out how to deliver what they’re writing in such a way that it actually reaches their intended readership AND to navigate the world of publishing until they land wherever it is they’re supposed to land: with an agent, with the right house, as a self-published author, or even as the author of an ebook.

This calling is the reason I’m saying goodbye to Seal Press this month, with a soaring heart. Thank you all for reading, and please know that my doors are open for business. I’m taking on new clients and accepting referrals. Spread the word!

Until next month,

Brooke

viagra

Among the many tips and ideas we discussed—from the value of creating an outline to freewriting to keeping your inner critic out of the way—was the role of theme in memoir.

This got me thinking about the value of theme, but also about two other important deliverables memoirists need to be thinking about when writing and selling their memoirs: positioning and takeaway. A memoir has to be able to be positioned (if not by you then by your future marketing team—so you might as well do this heavy-lifting before you start shopping your work) in order to sell. Its themes and takeaways need to be clear for an editor and his or her Editorial Board to be sold on the idea that it will hold value and meaning for a reader. With that in mind, here’s my quick 101 on these three invaluable deliverables.

Positioning Your Memoir

I’ve written about positioning before because it’s a concept that the average unpublished or first-time author too often fails to consider, usually because they just want to write and they don’t have a marketing background. Positioning you or your work is a process that involves understanding where you and/or your book belong in the marketplace, and how you are or will be perceived by your customers, fans, or buyers.

When it comes to memoir, you will generally position yourself by comparing your book to another writer’s. Overused examples include: “I’m the female David Sedaris,” or “My book is the next Eat, Pray, Love.” Because these are so overused, try to get more creative if either of these sentences are currently parked in your query letter or book proposal. Another way to position yourself is to counter-position yourself. For instance:

“My book is a cancer memoir in the vein of Kelly Corrigan’s The Middle Place. Unlike Corrigan, however, I do not delve into the deep or poignant side of cancer, intentionally keeping it light. My book is meant to be an uplifting, sassy look at motherhood and surviving cancer. My audience is younger women and young mothers, so think of my book as a mix between Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay and Bad Mother with a cancer twist.”

You can see right away how this positioning works—regardless of what you feel about such an approach. Do not try to be all things to all people. The more you can drill down and position your work as appropriate to a specific subset of readers the more likely you will be to get the attention of an agent or editor.

Identify Your Themes

As I mentioned, I’ve been turning around this idea of theme in memoir since the March 8 roundtable, in part because I said something on the call about most memoir being the result of having lived through something hard or challenging; or from having overcome something. And this is true to a certain extent. Misery memoir is the industry term for a very popular subset of memoir that includes books about mental illness (An Unquiet Mind), growing up in a crazy household (Jesus Land), eating disorders (Wasted), addiction (Drinking, A Love Story), surviving abuse (A Child Called It), difficult relationships and subsequent divorces (Happens Every Day), being the parent of a child with a disease or disorder (Schuyler’s Monster), and the list goes on and on. But of course there are uplifting memoirs, too—memoirs based on yearlong experiments (Julie and Julia), finding love in unlikely places (The Dirty Life), food glorious food (Blood, Bones, and Butter), traveling the world (Wanderlust), dance (Tango), parenting (Operating Instructions) . . . and this list too goes on and on and on.

So, what’s the point? That all memoirs must be easily identified for their theme—mental illness, abuse, food, travel, dance—but they all must have bigger umbrella themes too—becoming a different person, changing your life, going through a transformation, gaining a new perspective. The drill-down themes are the specific and nitty-gritty. They help to position your book and they do not need to be nuanced. But you will always have inherent themes—like the food in food memoir—and the more multilayered ones, like why cooking her way through Julia Child’s cookbook gave Julie Powell’s life new meaning. It takes the whole book to get there, but this subject of longing for meaning and finding it is certainly there—throughout.

The payoff of understanding your themes and making them work for you is felt by the reader of your book—whether that’s the agent who takes you on, the editor who buys your book, or your eventual reader. And theme is as important to the marketing of your book as it is to the writing. Knowing what your themes are (yes, you can have many) before you start is valuable (though not essential). Carrying them through the memoir is also hugely important. Every single chapter, in fact, should carry a theme, or two or three. For me, themes and through-threads are interchangeable. They’re what fuel the ah-has for your reader and probably, if you stop to think about it, what’s driving you to write your memoir in the first place.

If you can’t tell me in one sentence what your book is about, you’re not as clear as you need to be about your themes. Oftentimes my first exercise with someone when they approach me with a new idea for a memoir is to map out the themes of the book—well before we get to the outlining. So if you’re not 100% clear on this, do this exercise for yourself and for your book. It’s important for your memoir and critical for your proposal.

The Magic of Takeaways

As much as I think theme is important and I talk about it incessantly, if your book is lacking takeaways it’s completely unsalable. Lots of writers fail to truly express what their takeaways are because they think they’re inherent. For instance, you’re writing a book about an eating disorder and you get better and the takeaway is “things turned out.” But that’s not enough. Readers are looking for takeaways throughout the entire book. Just as a theme or two should run through every chapter, so should a takeaway. When I ask my clients to outline their books, I often require a takeaway sentence after each chapter summary. A takeaway might look something like this:

“Beauty is fleeting, and it’s not the only measure of a woman’s value. In this chapter the reader sees the author realizing for the first time that a man could love her for something deeper than her looks. This is a breakthrough moment for the author, and she ruminates on how she’s valued her beauty above all other qualities and how this has impacted her life.”

You’ll see that this is still about the author, but it’s an invitation for the reader to examine the ways in which she may have fallen prey to this kind of thinking. It invites the reader to examine broader social messaging and it is a subject that’s relatively universal. Even women who have not relied on their looks or who don’t feel defined by their beauty can relate to the sentiment of this takeaway in some capacity.

Just like theme, it’s good to know and understand your takeaways before you start writing. Or, if you’re already done with your memoir and you’ve never considered takeaways, find ways to go into the work and draw them out. Most likely they’re already there, laying tangled or hidden in the story. As the writer of a memoir, your job is to show them to the reader. You can do this subtly or overtly, depending on your voice, your style, and your skill.

***

I’d argue that these three things—positioning, theme, and takeaway—are what editors and agents are most often looking for when they’re examining a work, in addition to good writing and platform. But I’ve seen very well-written memoirs without any clear positioning and struggled to figure out how and where it could sell. Sometimes these are literary memoirs that span the entire life of the author, or that detail a particular adventure but fail to showcase the change effected by said adventure. Just because you lived it and it was interesting, exciting, and/or changed your life doesn’t mean that you have a built-in readership. So incorporate the above points and I assure you that your memoir will be far better received by agents, editors, and readers alike.

What are they?
1. Use subheads.
2. Get comfortable in the role of expert, teacher, or guide.
3. Be relatable.
4. Write like you talk.
5. Encourage your reader.

READ THE LONG VERSION HERE.

Thanks for following!

Goal: 10,000 words

Total number of words written: 4,700!

Commitment to self: Make it up in March and complete 20,000 by the end of next month.

Resolution: Don’t fall too far behind!

Check out my latest blog post at Write Your Book in Six Months about whether you should dust off an old project, or whether it might in fact be an emotion pit to avoid.

Happy Leap Year!

Brooke