After decades of urban sophistication, career hopping, and ambitious cocktail swilling, I traded it all for 11th hour parenthood. Apparently you can’t just hand in your 2 weeks’ notice for this one and there is no vacation..

Here we are, folks, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, and I am certain you’ve all been holding your breath – all three and a half of you  – in glorious suspense.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.

It is finally time to reveal (oh, I’m reveling in this! I’m sure you’re hanging on my every second-hand word!!) to hear what Dan, Dan the lavatory Editor Man had to say about

“The Secrets Behind Writing and Publishing Your First Book”

But in true informercial style, before I get to the good stuff I’m going to take the opportunity to sell something completely different to you, namely myself/my blog, and point out that I have just added a Facebook Fanpage link to the blog so please pop over and add yourself as a fan (obviously don’t do that if you think MTFF is a load of gobshite) and I also encourage you to subscribe to this blog. or sign up to have new posts sent to you by email.

The reason for this sudden self-aggrandizing scramble? All of these things make me look popular and add to my PLATFORM which I will be explaining shortly – it is related to today’s lesson.
You, too will be wanting a platform by the time you get to the end of this post and we’re not talking about the ones that Thomas, Percy and Gordon pull into. (If only we were,  because I’m really good at those!)

These are the basic lessons he taught us:

• How the publishing industry works
• How to find an agent
• How to write a query letter
• How to prepare a good proposal
• What really stupid things not to do
• How to be realistic in our expectations in terms of being an author
• How to tackle the business of selling your book both before and after a publishing deal

As there was so much information to take in I have decided, after much deliberation, to just give you the best and most entertaining bits, and also to drag this all out over a few more posts. We’ll get to the query letter today and I’ll continue with the rest of it a bit later. The extremely factual and numbers-related bits you can find out on the internets anyway (see Taking Responsibility, one of DDTEM‘s favourite phrases) and I loathe being boring. Intentionally boring, anyway. I take it that you’ll be too kind to tell me if I’m sending you to sleep by accident, or else you’ll just drift off elsewhere?

So, here we go, point one.  A bit dry, but I did promise..

How the publishing industry works:

Here’s the scoop: There are about 200, 000 books published in the US every year.

“How are you going to make yours one of them?” DDTEM asked us meaningfully.

“I’ll get me coat” thinks MTFF.

It used to be that the big NY publishers were the be all and end all of all things book-related in the US (btw, this was all US slanted advice).
No more. Where there were around 15 major houses, now there are 5, and their power base is crumbling. The big booksellers (Barnes&Noble, Borders etc) are losing money hand over fist and the indies have long been a dying breed.

Coming right up:  the gem I paid my $125 to hear:

The most powerful booksellers in the United States right now are (wait for it) Target, Wal-Mart and Costco.

I sort of love that, don’t you?

It’s so hard to get through to the hallowed halls of Random House, but they have to kiss ass at the place where I buy nappies to get their books on the tables so Two can drop free sample cookie crumbs on them.

DDTEM predicts that in a few years Amazon will be book king of the world,  becoming direct publishers as everyone will get a Kindle, or printing on demand and they will cut out the middle men who are currently the big publishers.
Interesting. Very interesting.

He also informed us that whether you go with a big publisher, or look to a smaller house, the fact remains that they will probably do little more for you, as a first time author, than print your book and find you distribution and act, in a small way, as a bankroll for your project. The most important thing he stressed, over and over again, was that YOU HAVE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR BOOK.
It is unlikely that you will be put on a book tour. Or if you do that many people will come unless you have been lucky enough to be picked up by a national TV show (again, he stressed that this was unlikely unless you have engineered it yourself). He said you were far more likely to have a 21 year old college intern lacklustrely making a couple of half-hearted calls on your behalf, if you were lucky. Best to organise it all yourself. Take responsibility.

I actually felt myself brightening at this point because I’m quite good at doing everything myself – I have a deep-seated and fundamental belief that I have to do everything that keeps the planet turning anyway, so why should this be any different?

He spoke a bit about self publishing and how it is losing its stigma. Technology has enabled this to become a very reasonable way of getting a book out. Again we looked to Amazon. They can print on demand, give you an author blog, rent you designers for the book covers etc. This can be a very viable way to get started. What you don’t get is distribution, PR, editors, etc. But you do get straight onto Kindle, and into the marketplace. And if you self-publish there is an entire industry of freelancers to assist you – you can hire PR people, hire editors (like DDTEM!), hire all kinds of other professionals  and this way control a huge amount of your work. It’s the ultimate way to take responsibility for your book. And many people have gone on to be picked up by publishers after this, so it’s worth considering. Of course it all costs money, so you’ll need some of that. You probably won’t make a lot of it.

Most publishers will not accept unsolicited material.

This means they don’t want you to send them anything. Don’t.

If it’s a really small publisher, they may have guidelines on their website for submission. If so, follow the guidelines precisely and don’t be tempted to do something different. You’ll just end up in the bin.

Publishers, on the whole, will prefer to have an agent offer them new material.

So. You need an agent.

How to get an agent:

First of all you need to identify the right agent for you. Don’t send an agent who represents fiction your ‘How to cook courgette hats’ manuscript, or your hooker memoir to an agent who represents children’s books. Do your research and find someone who represents books from the same genre. Then find out where they are and send them a query letter.

If you have the good luck to find an agent who is interested in you, remember that you are interviewing them just as they are you. It should be a good, trusting relationship and you will be stuck with that person throughout the life of the book and you have to believe that they believe in you and that you can work together well. They should take 15%, no more, and never ask for money up front. They will probably shop your book for you for a maximum of 6 months and if they haven’t found you a deal by then, they’ll probably let you go.

DO NOT SEND MATERIAL UNLESS IT IS REQUESTED OR THERE ARE SPECIFIC SUBMISSION GUIDELINES. It will be chucked out and you will annoy people. Don’t annoy anyone. Be professional. It is a business.

How to write a good query letter:

I suspect most of you reading this blog are actually rather good at writing letters, but just in case, I’m going to give you the outline. Keep it professional (Dear Mr. Blogs/Ms Smith) and make sure you spell their name correctly. Then you tell them that you are writing to them specifically because you like their work and you have a project you think will interest them (obviously put this in your own words).

You are not supposed to outright lie in your query letter. Dan, Dan, the editor man said this several times. But I’m sure you’re supposed to make yourself as attractive as possible. However, in the interests of entertainment and for bowing and scraping purposes I might have told an untruth or two in this example, see if you can spot them.

Dear Ms Smith

I am writing to say that I loved “Bad Mother” by Ayelet Waldman and to congratulate you on its success. It has been a big influence on my own project Motherhood:the Final Frontier

Then you give them a short (SHORT! 2 sentences) description of your own book)

which is a narrative/memoir/fuckknows* based on my blog of the same name that provides an insight into the world of a former British pop star-turned-reluctant-Stepford-wife/eleventh-hour-parent who suffered a midlife crisis due to the humbling role of parenting after the glamorous life of rock-n-roll but then found her true life’s purpose in amongst the dirty diapers and illuminating trips to Costco, Target and Wal-Mart. And Amazon.

*don’t say this

Then a short (SHORT!!) Author biog.  Anything that legitimizes you as a writer or your experience on this matter. This is your Platform. Do you have a blog? Are you already a magazine writer? Do you have Twitter followers? Do you have a ready made audience of any kind or any authority in this area? This is where you get a couple of sentences to brag about it. Not more.

In my career as a pop star I sold over 100,000 records worldwide including top 40 hits in the UK and USA. I have a regular parenting column at www.bambinogoodies.co.uk which reaches over a million readers every week.  My own blog has sixtygazillion subscribers, a hundred hits per nanosecond and has over 400000000 Twitter followers, all who swear they’d love to buy the book. MTFF is also listed as one of the UK’s top 100 parent bloggers.

Then you tell them what you can send them next (one of the following, and you’d better have it ready, guess which one is true, don’t do that one)

¨ I have a manuscript of 50,000 words upon request

¨ A comprensive proposal if available upon request

¨ An outline and sample chapter available upon request

¨ A few old posts and some sketchy ideas not really put in any kind of order available upon request

Thank you in advance for your consideration,

Mothership

A big hint from Dan, Dan. Type it on white paper. Do not use glitter pen. Do not send pictures of unicorns. Do not make it ‘personal’ or arty in any way. Just very businesslike. Everything else gets binned.
Honestly.

So here we are at the end of Part Deux. I rarely write anything of any practical use, it’s usually something faintly onanistic and self-serving, but hopefully some of you will have found this helpful.

I will continue in a day or two with the remaining points if anyone else is interested, but please don’t hesitate to tell me if you’re bored titless.

And if this WAS useful, please don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email and  facebook fanpage because now that I am thinking of writing my book for real, I have become a revolting PLATFORM WHORE and will be getting out my proverbial hotpants and shaking my (thankfully) virtual booty at you for a bit. But then I’ll forget because I’ll have those urgent cups of tea to make and everyone will be safe again.

Mothership xoxo

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Due to a slight oversight on my part, I failed to book Five in for any activities at all this week and thus have had what she would call, delightedly, an entire ‘Mummy week’ where I get to entertain her at every waking moment. This was not quite how I saw motherhood during those misty-eyed moments when I was lovingly folding tiny white, fluffy babygros into the as-yet-unscratched chest of drawers in her room, but it turns out that her favourite refrain at five is

“I’m BORED! What shall we do?”

And I, in an eerie echo of my own mother, reply

“Well, why don’t you think of something interesting to do? Like look at a book? Play with your toys? Water the garden?”

“No that’s all BORING!”

Then I pull out the big guns.

“If you don’t think of something yourself by the time I count to three I will entertain you by having you help me empty the dishwasher. How is that?”

You’d think this would miraculously send her off to find something edifying, and 50% of the time it works, but the other half it sends her onto the floor in a dramatic slump, hand draped across her forehead with a huge groan, saying;

“I can’t believe you’re so MEAN! And I’m so BORED! I just want to go away forever and be somewhere and you’ll miss me and CRY!”

Wasn’t this supposed to happen a bit later on?

So there has been a fair bit of tongue biting going on around here and countings to ten (that’s me – she can already do that with great savvy, of course). But there have also been many delightful outings to the library, beach, coffee shop, museum etc. Today we took a train to a neighbouring town to have a picnic breakfast which was tremendous fun, particularly as we could see cars overtaking our carriage – can this be the only country I’ve lived in where the cars on the highway, traveling a modest 65mph can outstrip a diesel locomotive?  But in amongst all the holiday shenanigans there has not been much time for post writing or adult relaxing and certainly no time to add to my novel (past page 1 now, but perhaps not as far as I’d like to be).

I did, however,  manage to squeeze in an email to Max, and was very pleased to get one back the same day. I thought you might like to hear what he had to say, too, so here is the text of both.
Short and sweet, just like him.

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 11:11 AM, mothership <> wrote:

Hi Max
Just wondering how you were getting on and if you had liked any of the other bands on the list we gave you on July 4th. Hope your summer is going well and you’re practicing that guitar!
Rock and roll!
Mothership xo

Bless his hardcore socks!

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Everywhere I go I meet myself.

This isn’t exactly a Zen motto (although perhaps it should be)

I mean that lately I keep on running into various earlier versions of myself. Mostly the sad, confused, vulnerable ones and although I often have a tremendous urge to help and treat them with compassion I do occasionally have the compulsion to give them a huge shove and run away screaming “NO! Not that again! I can’t bear it!”

That is not my highest inner voice, obviously.

And how very telling of my own lack of integration that I do not always immediately recognise these incarnations and their gifts.

These are usually, perhaps unsurprisingly, children.

This past July 4^th I had taken Five on a little trip, just we two, to visit my father and his family in Washington DC. On the day itself there was a party at my his country house in Virginia. Sixty-three acres of rolling hills, trees and swimming pond, plus about 30 adults and assorted children all milling about at the obligatory patriotic barbeque. Five was the youngest for a change and was delightedly lapping up all the attention that being a visiting grandchild accords, and she bossily showed the others what poison ivy looked like and where the stores of insect eggs she had discovered were hidden. The children – aged between five and ten – roamed around in a cheerful gang.

All of them except Max.

He was very, extremely busy with important things, the vast majority of which involved being told off for antisocial behaviour by his exasperated father.

Max found it quite hard not to hit outdoor furniture with large sticks ripped off ancient, live oaks, or do suspicious things with lengths of rope that he found in hitherto locked sheds. He was also rather fond of kicking unspecified foreign objects around the lawn with that combination of aimless aggression and lurching menace that only young boys and bored, caged apes can muster. My father calls it ‘lurgging around’ (with a hard ‘G’). Max was had turned the lurgging dial up to eleven and was clearly driving his father bananas, thus the constant, badgering admonishments. He was also succeeding in alienating the other children who were mostly focussed on ice cream eating, Mother-May-I-playing, insect hunting and swimming.
Not tree-murder and smacking each other.

Poor Max.
To add to his woes there was only one other boy present.
Enter Joseph: An exceptionally beautiful and sweet-natured child a few years younger who had been rather fiercely claimed by Five, so whenever Max tried to play, in a cackhanded, puppyish male way, he would be trumped by the superior social manoeuvering of the girls and eventually give up and wander off feeling left out and resentful, as if he didn’t quite understand how to insert himself into the social structure. Heartbreaking. It transpired a little later, from tidbits I overheard, that Max suffered from a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome; interaction was a challenge for him under any circumstances and he was frequently frustrated and angered by emotions he could not name or easily express– thus the stick and rope show. In addition his parents had split up recently – painful for anyone – and to top it all off his little sister, who at that moment was having a grand old time as the eldest of the girl gang, was streaking ahead of him academically, socially and athletically.
It just wasn’t fair on the guy.
I began to feel quite sympathetic towards him for wanting to beat up the plant life – I would too.
But alas, as with all of us who are in the midst of a crisis, his awkward behaviour did not exactly endear him to people. What most of us saw was a badly behaved, angry boy, past the age of redeeming cuteness but nevertheless in the terrible realm of childhood powerlessness,  still crucial steps away from adolescence where at least he might find company in other kids who would wear black and write bad poetry.

Interestingly, Joseph was more willing than the other kids to tolerate Max and his idiosyncracies , but it was Joseph’s father who wanted to keep him away from the dischordant boy.
A bad influence, he muttered.  A destructive, angry child who would not be good for the sunny, happy-go-lucky sweetie-pie seven-year old.
I could appreciate that, although it might be fair to point out that the dad himself had what you might generously term a chequered past that was still not in its present incarnation, a gleaming path of white tiles.
I suppose, though, the more deprived of innocence one is oneself, the more viciously one guards it in one’s offspring.
I am also guilty of this. I should not judge.

The removal of Joseph left Max with literally nobody to play with. So after being told rather firmly by me that he should not jump up and down in my dad’s prized miniature japanese ornamental cherry tree and break off its branches, he wandered off sulkily and sought refuge, once again, in his friends the sticks.

By now I was past vexation and just felt desperately sorry for him, so I followed, wondering what I could say to make him feel a bit better.

For a few moments I was at a loss for words.

Middle aged, middle class mother looks at disconsolate, annoying boy and wonders what to say to younger generation.

Um. Uh.Let’s see now…

Was I just another irritating grownup who would say something eye-rollingly unhelpful?

I could feel an apron growing out of my suddenly spreading middle and a bun and spectacles sprouting out of my silly, fat, greying head like the terrifying special effects in the movie “She’s getting OLD and OUT OF TOUCH!”.

No, wait! STOP! That’s not me. That is not why I am here!! Erase!! Rewind!! (what is this ‘rewind’ says Gen Y?)

Here is a child, ten years old; angry, sad, lonely, feeling bad about himself, surrounded by kids he doesn’t fit in with and adults who don’t understand him.
I know EXACTLY how that feels. I may not want to remember, but I do.
It feels like shit and actually anyone who reaches out without patronising is going to help.

Max was beating up an imaginary foe.

“Are you practicing your Samurai” I asked.

“How did you know I liked Samurai?” suspicious an defiant, but also a bit pleased.

“A wild guess”

He suppresses a smile, thinks a bit, then throws me a challenge. His eyes are hard and arms are crossed.

“Did you know I really like punk rock music? And heavy metal? I like the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I listen to it a lot. My Dad hates it. It’s VERY LOUD!”

Little does he realise that this, for me, is the golden ticket.

I laugh.

“That is very cool, Max. Did you know that I like punk rock music too? I have actually seen the Clash in concert when I was about your age. And your dad is SUPPOSED to hate it! Good for you. Make it as loud as you can.”

“You’ve SEEN the Clash?” (so easy to impress a 10 year old) “Did you know that Sid Vicious was in the Sex Pistols??” (how cute is that?)

At this point Joseph’s mother, with whom I have been friends since we were young teenagers wanders over. She and I are veterans of the DC Hardcore scene (that’s punk, not porn for anyone who is wondering, and yes, we started going to shows when we were, um, about 3) .

I tell her that Max is into punk and metal and she is completely enchanted and demands to know who his favourite bands are. He lists a few obvious choices (Pistols, Clash, Ramones). Upon further quizzing we realise that he doesn’t really know any other bands which is really rather sweet. We tell him that we were into that kind of music when we were young and that J’s mother used to have purple hair and that I used to have pink hair and that neither of us wore any colour except black and he is totally enthralled. Then J’s mother tells him that I used to be a rock star and he practically faints with delight. He tells us he plays guitar, though not very well. We tell him that this is entirely appropriate for a punk rocker and that in the beginning none of them could play either. He is immensely cheered by this. He confides that none of the kids he knows like his music or understand it and that he wants to be in a band but nobody else does or wants to play with him. We ascertain that he’s in 5^th grade and we advise him to spend the next two years playing very loud music, practicing his guitar, writing songs and by the time he hits junior high he will find others who are ready and able to be in a band with him and then he will be streets ahead. He then asks us, with great peer-to-peer seriousness what instruments we play and we chat, with surprising ease, about the pros and cons of bass versus guitar and how being a vocalist is good in some ways but limiting in others. He already sounds like a real musician. I feel great hope for him.

I tell him that Joseph’s mother and I met and became friends because we were part of a group of outcast kids who didn’t fit in with anyone else. We were all angry or sad or misfits and that was why we loved that music. That was why he loved that music. It sounded like he felt inside.  I told him that whenever he felt mad or sad to take that feeling, which was an energy, and pick up his guitar – just like his heroes – and put it into the music. It was going to be better, and feel better, than throwing a stick around. It didn’t matter if he sucked. It just mattered that he did it.

As I told him this he looked straight into my eyes and for a moment or two our souls locked. He knew I was telling him the something important.
He knew because he has a keen ear for music and he can recognise the ring of truth.

Then we asked him if he wanted some ideas for new bands to listen to.

He did.

We got a pen and paper and started writing them down.

It started out with J’s mother and me thinking up a few fairly accessible (read chart-friendly) punk bands for Max to get on with. We felt some sense of responsibility for his musical education so we gave him The Damned, Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of other obvious choices. Then my dad wandered up and suggested we also lead him forward in time – he might also like some early Ska music – I had loved it at his age. Ok, on the list. Then J’s mother insisted we compile a separate DC hardcore list- he is a DC kid, after all, and then we could impress him with all the people we personally know at a later date and feel less old and has-beenish (although surely that would make us feel more has-beenish?). Then J’s father reappeared, suddenly changing his tune (geddit?) declaring himself an authority on punk and started adding obscure-but-important bands so that I had to turn over the page and keep scribbling. An unlikely looking, slightly sweaty economist who had been eavesdropping piped up from the porch that he, himself, was a metalhead – he felt this category was underrepresented – and gave us a number of loud suggestions for eardrum explosion. It was getting hard to keep up with it all, and the crowd kept growing.

Meanwhile Max was in complete heaven. He had gone from ostracized outcast to the life and soul of the party in just a few minutes. This was very touching to see. And more than that, he had inspired a reunion of sorts – it turned out that all of us clustered around the ever-enlarging list had been Max in one guise or another. Here we all were, showing off to one another that we belonged, after all.
To the music, to each other, to ourselves, and ultimately to Max.

Max was overheard later telling my father that this was the “Best party EVER, THANKS!” and he hugged me tightly before he left.

But really, I think it’s me who owes something to him.

Thank you Max.

Thanks for the memories.

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