I hear every day from storytellers, “How much do I have to invest before the money comes to me instead?”

My answer is: “How much do you want to invest in your career?” The intellectual property you’re creating can be more valuable than real property. But would you limit your investment in real estate to $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, or even $100,000? Until you get your mind squared away to value the career you’re trying to master, you will not achieve success in it. Storytelling for the commercial marketplace of publishing and motion picture production is highly competitive, for professionals only, and highly lucrative. It is NOT a hobby, or a trip to the candy store.

DON’T READ AFFECT INTO EMAIL

We’ve all experienced situations where someone gets an email you wrote in haste (aren’t all emails written in haste these days?) and someone reads “affect” into it and gets bent out of shape. Long ago, when I was guilty of reading that way, a dear Hungarian professor friend of mine said, “You read faces into fire.” Which meant, “don’t judge someone’s meaning from the face he’s making”—it may have nothing at all to do with you. By the same token, don’t read emotion into email. Just read the words that are there. And, if you truly have a doubt, or feel that something is amiss, PICK UP THE PHONE and call the person to avoid this situation escalating! It’s that simple. There is still reason for viva voce communication in today’s frenetic world.

Back Pain - Occupational Hazard

Back pain is the new smoking. Especially for writers, who are sitting at their computers all day, back pain has become an occupational hazard. It certainly has with me. But I’ve come up with a solution that has been sure-fire so far: the household ironing board. It now sits next to my desk and is most of the time used as a handy if somewhat unsightly sorting device—projects laid out more or less in stacks. But at the least twinge of back pain, which has been so debilitating it’s put me in the hospital for three days recently—I simply move my keyboard to the ironing board and stand up. After standing for a day, which has the added benefit of burning more calories, the pain disappears. Try it!

Creative People

Have you ever noticed that creative people seem to be happiest with a mess around them? That’s not quite accurate. They live in a perpetual cycle: they create a mess, then they straighten it out. But they don’t live “straight” very long. Something makes them throw the papers around, toss the clothes on the nearest chair, leave all the doors open. They need to create the mess in order to create order. Maybe it’s what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he said, “One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.” The mess finally results in a published book, a produced film, a concert, a painting, a photograph, a great performance. The ultimate organization is accomplishment.

The Emmys

Well, NOT winning the Emmy gave me something to muse and be amused about. Before the ceremony, I’d never had aspirations to HAVE an Emmy. Now I do. Even though I agree with my friend Nina Reznick, “Every nominee is a winner,” it would be nice to win because it’s nice to have that particular artifact on the piano to dust. Meanwhile, we will plod on to the next opportunity, remembering George Burns’ comment, “I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than be a success at something I hate.”

Showing Up

Achievement and success aren’t all about feeling GREAT all the time. I can tell you that I’ve often wondered about the speakers I hear who pretend like they’re ALWAYS at the top of their game, when, in fact, I believe we all have to get ourselves to the grindstone nearly every single morning–not leaping out of bed, but going through the motions until the sparks start flying. And they do, as you say, start flying once the positive energy of work takes over. It’s just if you’re not there, it won’t happen. The biggest effort of all is putting all the cobwebs in your brain aside and just SHOWING UP at your writing desk. As a great baseball player once said, “Practice all the time. If you’re not practicing, someone else is out there practicing–and when he meets you, he will beat you.”

Reading an excellent interview with producer Graham King in Produced by:

“For me, producing is about controlling your own destiny. And it’s starting small. It’s starting as a salesman, going from country to country, with literally a 35 millimeter frame, trying to sell a movie that no one has ever heard of. And it takes awhile. People come in to me for jobs and I ask, ‘What do you want to do? ‘I want to be a producer.’ I say, ‘Well, that’s 12 to 15 years of learning, if you’re lucky enough to learn from the right people. And all my staff here, I completely drill it into their head. ‘If you want to be a producer, great. Do this. Do that. Learn this. Learn that.’ Because that’s how it was for me. And if people hadn’t given me certain breaks and opened certain doors, I wouldn’t be here now. So it’s great to pass that on.”


That’s what we try to offer to our clients. Experience in the school of hard knocks!

Where Your Book Is Purchased Counts!

A client asked whether he should ask his friends, who are hellbent on pre-ordering his books on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, to wait and purchase the books from the bookstore when the publication is released. The answer is that if they buy the book from a bookstore that counts toward the bestseller lists, whereas purchasing online only counts for that website’s bestseller list. If they do purchase online, at least ask them to write a review! That counts in the grand scheme of things too.

E Mails

A client complained this morning that he gets five little emails from me instead of a “more efficient” one long email. There’s a reason. If I get one long email I can’t answer it until I can answer all the parts. That may take awhile. I’d much prefer a short email on a single subject so I can deal with that subject and get back to the sender without waiting. But that’s just me.

Just talked another client out of a job (mine!)

By telling her that she shouldn’t, given the details of her particular case, continue to fight the traditional publishing fight. That the publishers are in such a morass of confusion these days that all she’d be doing is losing control of her book (nonfiction, already successful in her lecture circuit) and dropping her income from the current $18 per copy she makes to about $1.50 per copy if she got it published. I believe she’ll be on kindle’s doorstep before I finish writing this sentence! Note, this isn’t true for everybody but it’s certainly true for her. She has her own avid following, is a businesswoman, and knows how to market herself (so that people will find the book on the internet). That’s the best of all possible worlds for e-publishing!

Publicity

Sitting through a publicity meeting the other day, I reminded my clients of my standard rules for dealing with the press:

1. The host is giving you millions of dollars worth of publicity, but

2. Remember, “these people are not your friends.”

3. Every question is a trick question.

4. Pause before you answer.

5. Make sure you get across YOUR AGENDA.

6. Set the hook to make the audience want to read more of what you’re saying.

7. Make them want to interview you again.

8. Talk in “sound bites,” memorable short sentences.

9. Show your gratitude.

10. Don’t do the interview AT ALL if your books are not available yet for purchase.

11. Don’t assume your interviewer knows all about you—OR your book.

Tips on Breaking into Show Business, gleaned from here and there:

1. Remember, it’s a business. Figure out the business interest of the person at the other side of the desk before you get to the meeting.

2. Don’t assume anything is the way it was a year ago.

3. Network--with anyone and everyone you know, and find out “what’s going on.”

4. Get contacts from contacts: always ask for three more contacts from every contact you meet.

5. Value the “insider’s” time more than your own.

6. Set "informational meetings"--more often accepted by the other side.

7. Meaning: Ask for their advice. Don’t worry, if they’re interested themselves, they won’t be shy about it.

8. Try to enter the Industry through your area of expertise--if you’re a lawyer then

9. through legal or business affairs department. If you’re a publicist, through the p.r. department.

10. Have a compelling story about your passion about film rather than your general belief that show business could be lucrative for you.

11. Be informed about the Industry, even if new to it.

12. Be informed about the person you’re meeting with. Do your homework.

13. Be willing to do anything that’s required to make your work better.

14. Be humble and willing to invest in your career.

15. Be inventive about getting your work in front of decision-makers.

16. Be patient and persistent, and you’ll find a way in—and look for sudden opportunities in this land of “right place and right time.”

17. Be flexible about jobs offered, and take opportunities. Access is all.

18. Always be positive, no matter how bad the situation.

19. Always be passionate about what you do.

20. Read up on the fields that interest you and the people that populate them.

21. Master the fine, undefined line between being persistent and being a pest.

Do Conferences Help?

You betcha! One of the most difficult challenges writers face today is ACCESS, and meeting an agent, attorney, publicist, publisher, or other facilitator at a conference separates you from the faceless masses. It’s a PRIME STRATEGY for taking your writing career into your own hands. From time to time, I recommend the conferences I’ve attended or found effective on my mainblog and in the daily inspire@storymerchant.com Stay tuned!

Change

Every day I run into writers who are clueless about the shifts in the industry, both publishing and entertainment. They have expectations and demands that fit a culture that no longer exists. I can only spend so much time educating them. That’s your responsibility, as a writer who wants to cross over into the promised land of the published or produced. The internet lies before you like a vast land of dreams, yours for the understanding. Explore it thoroughly before you submit your work. Things have changed, things are changing, things will continue to change. The only thing the remains constant is the need for stories, for content, for intellectual property.