Charlottesville Words

There’s a difference between being a good writer and being a good author. Rachel Toor discusses the difference in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some tips:

By the time I left publishing, in the mid-90s, I had decided there were no bad books, only bad authors.

That, of course, is not true. There are plenty of bad books. But after a dozen years in the industry, the whining and whingeing of authors had worn me down: The conspiracy theories about how a publisher set out to ruin an author’s career by not sending his 15-year-old book to a small regional conference; the notion that a publisher sullied an author’s reputation by giving her a red cover; the complaint that there were not enough ads promoting the book (there were never enough ads); the indignation that we didn’t get the author reviewed in The New York Times, or booked on Oprah.

No whining!

I asked my literary agent, Susan Arellano, what makes for a “bad” author. Susan has worked as an editor at both trade and university presses and now commands six-figure advances for academic authors. With characteristic acumen, she answered: “Bad authors are the ones who don’t know, or can’t remember, that publishing is a business.”

What does that mean? “It means that their egos take over and they want that New York Times ad even though they know that ads, more often than not, don’t sell books,” she said. “It means they think everyone in the world will want to buy their book, even though they know that a book on the semiotics of trout fishing has a very small audience.”

Wait a minute…six figure advances for academic authors?? Now I’m distracted…

So how do you avoid being a bad author? Before you submit a manuscript to a press, make sure you’re writing to the right place. ….When you’re looking for a publisher, look first at your own bookshelves. It’s easy to find the ones that publish in your field. Read the acknowledgment sections of the books you admire. There you’ll often find the name of the editor — and agent, if there was one.

Good advice for anyone.

Once you get settled with a press, do your job: Write a good book (of the appropriate length), prepare it according to the submission guidelines, and deliver it on time. Most publishers, especially at university presses, don’t care as much about exactly when you submit your final manuscript — regardless of the contract date — as that they know when to expect it.

Let us not be like Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier, who dallied ten years before delivering on an $8 million advance.

There are many more tips in the article. It’s worth reading to the end, where you’ll find this author bio:

Rachel Toor is an assistant professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Her most recent book is The Pig and I: How I Learned to Love Men (Almost) as Much as I Love My Pets (Plume, 2006)…

You have to admit, it’s an intriguing (if not terribly enticing) title.