Author-ized Articles

Ta ever so to Shel Holtz for tagging me on this. I have mixed feelings about blog memes anyway, and none of my blogs is really the kind that such a post is appropriate for, since despite encouraging comments, I’m really a columnist, not a blogger. But it’s an interesting sort of challenge to list 8 things about me that pass the test I have for anything that goes online: would I be willing for my mother and my clients to read it?

My mother is not actually online, but many of my family members are, and all of my clients. So what can I reveal that most people don’t know about me but that wouldn’t be likely to lose me a job or horrify my mother? I doubt any of them will be news to close friends and family members, but they might be to people who wandered over here from Shel’s blog or who know me primarily for my Reports from the Asylum on FIR.

1. I learned to ride a horse at the age of three, shortly after learning to read. You can blame my mother for my precocity in both areas. I’m still reading, but haven’t been on a horse for years, even for a trail ride. The skill stays with you, but the muscles don’t.
2. I played the Cheshire Cat in a youth theater production of Alice in Wonderland. In some scenes I was replaced by a large plywood grin.
3. When I was in high school, my ambition was to become a psychologist. Once I got to college, I discovered I didn’t have all that much aptitude/interest, and got sucked into the Classics Vortex instead.
4. I wrote my first never-published novel during my freshman year in college. (While not doing my psychology homework.) It was about Helen of Troy from her point of view.
5. There is actual video footage of me in the role of the drunken madam in a production of Plautus’ Cistellaria at the University of Michigan. (I was not originally cast in this role, but the actress had to go into emergency surgery on opening night, and I knew the script because I’d translated it.) And no, I am not going to post it on YouTube.
6. I own more than 30 hats, but don’t wear most of them because there isn’t room to keep them in my apartment. (And anyway, I don’t need wool hats as much in California as I did in England.)
7. My partner’s parents hated me at first sight. After almost 13 years, his mother is now reconciled to the fact that I’m not going away, but still appreciates me most from a distance.
8. I get migraines at least once a month. They have driven me on more than one occasion to pray for menopause, but as I’m only 40, this is somewhat in the nature of Augustine’s “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.”

I don’t believe I actually know 8 bloggers who haven’t already participated in this little adventure, but I’ll tag Tee Morris, Stefan Didak and Keith Ferrazzi. (Keith, wait ’til you can type, huh?)

The third quality you should look for in a prospective ghostwriter is the ability to mimic your writing style. Well known authors—particularly novelists—have distinctive writing styles, sometimes to the point that you can recognize their work even without seeing the name on the spine of the book. A ghostwriter has to be able to master many different styles of writing, to subsume his or her own “voice” into yours. It’s a bit like developing a good accent when learning a foreign language. A ghostwriter is not a “star” with a recognizable face, but more like the character actor you’ve seen in a dozen movies, never realizing all those parts were played by the same person.

Unless your prospective ghost already knows you well or you’ve worked together before, he probably won’t be able to write in your “voice” without hearing you talk and reading your writing. An experienced ghostwriter should be able to show you samples of work done in a range of different styles.

Note that in some cases the writer may need permission from clients to share this work, because either the work itself or the relationship with the client might be confidential. In such cases, be sure to ask for references who can attest to this ability.

If you’re interested in hiring someone who hasn’t worked as a ghost before, try asking her to rewrite a paragraph or two in the style of a famous writer: Shakespeare, or Stephen King, or Barbara Cartland, or anyone whose work is readily available and who has a distinctive style.

Continuing our series on how to find the best ghostwriter for your project, we move on to our second criterion for success, Active Listening.

The ability to listen to you—and more, to understand you—is important in any consultant you hire. A ghostwriter’s job is to “channel” your ideas. That means paying attention, taking notes, making recordings, and accurately reflecting back what you say. A good listener will ask pertinent questions about your project during the interview process.

Make sure to ask prospective ghosts to write something that demonstrates this ability. If you already have a rough draft and want a rewrite, ask the writers you’ve interviewed to rewrite a short section (250-500 words of a long document). If you want a series of newsletters, ask for a sample introductory issue (or article)—again, short enough not to give the impression you’re trying to get the work done for free. And always ask them to sum up the project itself—what you want them to do, who your audience is, and what you want to accomplish—in a few paragraphs.

If you don’t think “That’s exactly what I meant, but more so,” when you read their responses, you may need to keep looking. Don’t worry too much yet about how well the writer captures your “voice,” though: that’s something it takes time to perfect.

When you hire a ghostwriter to help you with a project, it’s your name and reputation on the line. If you’ve never worked with a ghost before, you might think the most important thing is to find a good writer.

But most people who stay in business as professional writers can write competently, grammatically—even brilliantly. Just as not all great performers make great teachers, it takes more than good English or publishing credits to create a successful ghost/author relationship. You may find yourself having to choose between several candidates with impeccable credentials and solid references. Here are ten criteria to help you choose the right ghost for you.

1. Compatibility

It may seem strange to put “compatibility” at the top of this list, but the relationship a ghostwriter has with a client—particularly when writing memoirs and autobiography—is an intimate one. Your ghost has to be able to get inside your head. That means spending a lot of time together. If you wouldn’t want to invite this person to dinner with your family, how do you think you’re going to make it through months of close collaboration?

It’s a good idea to meet with prospective ghostwriters in person before you make any hiring decisions. You can schedule the interview either after you look at writing samples and check references, or before. If you can’t meet in person, try to arrange a video chat. Services like Skype (www.skype.com) and Oovoo (www.oovoo.com) let you do this for free, as long as you have a webcam and a microphone.

Today is the last day to get a free copy of Marketing Sherpa’s 80-page report (regular price US$127) How to Get Your Business Book Published. If it’s still November 27, 2007 as you read this, go download your copy of the report right now and don’t wait to finish reading this post. If it’s too late and you want to know whether to pony up the $127, read on.

The report starts with an examination of what writing a business book is good for your career and covers everything from agents, publishers, contracts, and marketing to—yes—working with a ghostwriter. It concludes with four sample book proposals from successfully published books.

Examples like this are always worth having, because every author—even those who self-publish—should have a proposal. These are recent examples, so they give you a good idea of what you need to know and do to make your book succeed in today’s saturated publishing world. The report also provides contact information for business book agents (rarer and harder to find than agents for fiction) and publishers.

Marketing Sherpa’s recommendations and warnings are consistent with those in RainToday’s 2006 Business Book Publishing Reports (well worth reading, if you haven’t seen them yet). There’s plenty of fresh, original material here, though, and it’s presented in a very accessible way. Two of my favorite sections are those on agent turn-offs and myths about publishing.

And what does Marketing Sherpa think about hiring a ghostwriter? The best way to sum it up is probably “When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.” And naturally I’m in full accord with their conclusion:

As in most things, you get what you pay for when it comes to hiring ghost writers. Professional, experienced writers charge more than, say, a graduate student majoring in writing—spend the money to go with the professional. You’ll save time and money in the long run—the better the work, the less rewriting and editing you’ll do. Expect to spend at least $5,000 (it could be much more) for a 250-page book.

While it may seem that the ghost does all the work while you get all the credit, that’s not the case. You’ll need to work closely with the ghost writer from the beginning to be certain that everything you want to say will be included. You will probably want to at least provide the writer with an outline, and will certainly want to spend some time giving the writer background on the subject. Then, once the copy is written, you need to make sure everything is exactly the way you want. You must copyedit, fact-check, and revise—or have the ghost revise—until the book is perfect. Remember, it’s your name on the book.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

It’s here at last: fEmpowerment: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, by Sandy Shepard (a.k.a. Solitaire). And me, but mostly her. We started working on this book in 2005 and built it up out of posts on her Double Oh! Productions blog. You can order it from the Be a Bond Girl website or the usual sources (like Amazon).

Why Bond Girls?

Because Sandy takes them as a model for a life with more passion, enjoyment, fun, and fulfillment than many of us have right now. You don’t have to be a fan of the James Bond films to get something out of this book. I was a little skeptical about it, myself, but in the course of editing it, I learned a lot of things that have helped with my relationships. (No pole dancing classes for me, though.) Sandy takes a fun, practical, and very specific approach to getting rid of anything that doesn’t work for you and putting some adventure back in your life.

Who Should Buy This Book?

Women, especially if you

1. Have become so powerful and successful in your career that you find yourself isolated on a lonely mountaintop
2. Don’t really know what you want or like because you’ve been too busy trying to fit in
3. Want to have more fun at work, at home, with friends, and with your “James.”

Men, especially if

1. Your spouse or girlfriend fits into any category above
2. You aspire to live the James Bond lifestyle yourself.

And remember: no one is ever too old to be a Bond Grrl.

Disclosure

Naturally, since I helped write this book, I’m biased in favor of it. But I don’t make any money from sales of the book; I haven’t even set up an Amazon affiliate link in this post.

The other day I posted some of my Podcast Asylum articles on EzineArticles.com. Within an hour of their approval, the Google alert I have set on my own name produced a link to a post entitled “Der Podcast Von Meiner Unzufriedenheit.” For those who don’t read German, that’s “The Podcast of My Discontent.”

More like the blog posting of my discontent, since it was my own article, “Podcasting without Podcasting,” translated into German and posted without the resource box linking back to my site—but with my copyright notice and name still on it. My German is rusty, and was never colloquial, so I couldn’t really tell whether there had been human hands involved in the translation process. It surely seemed like a human mind behind the title, and German is a very literal sort of language.

So I asked the Ur-Guru, whose German is better than mine. (Dutch is very similar to German, too, so that probably helps him get a better feel for the rhythm of the language.) He assured me that it was a computer translation and no human had been involved, and I shouldn’t bother posting a comment on the blog. (Which I had already done by that time.)

I’ve had material stolen and posted to splogs (spam blogs created to generate AdSense revenue) before, but usually it’s a couple of paragraphs combined with material scraped from other people’s blogs, combined into a mishmash that makes no sense at all but apparently contains some useful keywords.

This is the first time (to my knowledge) that my material was not merely appropriated but also translated into another language. Hence “Transcraping.”

It’s difficult to prevent that kind of thing from happening, and not usually worth the effort to try protecting one’s intellectual property, especially when I’ve made the article available for reprint free of charge. And anyone reading the German would figure out who the author was, regardless of the poster’s name. (Actually, any German speaker would probably have a fit laughing at the auto-translation.) And there probably aren’t many actual readers of splogs anyway—just bots committing click-fraud.

Then Donna Papacosta, my fellow podcasting “professor,” discovered that the article had been translated back out of German into English. Now we could fall about laughing at the way “you feel as though you really know them” became “you experience as though you really cognize them,” not to mention the way Heidi Miller became “Heidi Glenn Miller.” (An extra keyword, perhaps? A sex change Heidi didn’t tell me about?)

Mostly I laughed. But the thing is, my name is still on that article, and I work as a professional writer. As the Ur-Guru pointed out, “If someone were to take ‘Comments are male monarch in the human race of podcasting’ as your writing, it would not be good advertising for the Author-izer.”

No, it certainly wouldn’t, though I like to think my potential clients are sophisticated enough to be suspicious of English that unnatural. At least I haven’t (yet) experienced the problem some of my fellow writers have, that of someone stealing just your name and putting it on his or her own articles in order to borrow credibility.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no other Sallie Goetsch on the planet, which means that if you do a search on my name, what comes up is either me or someone (or thing) impersonating me. And at least the first thing that comes up on a Google search is my own website.

But if you read something strange-seeming with my name appended to it, check with me before you accept it as genuine.

Charles Hodgson, host of Podictionary, the podcast for word lovers, e-mailed me a few weeks ago to ask whether I’d like a copy of his Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia. (That’s the subtitle; the main title is Carnal Knowledge. And while I’m on the subject of titles, I love the fact that HTML distinguishes between book titles and other things you italicize, by using the <cite> tag. Of course, some style sheets render <cite> and <em> using something other than italics. But I digress.)

Of course I said yes. As a writer and a student of languages, sitting down to read a dictionary is just the kind of thing I like to do. Though I no longer read Greek and Latin for a living, I remain a philologist in the root sense of the word.

Podictionary provides “the surprising histories of words you thought you knew.” Carnal Knowledge provides words both familiar and unfamiliar, from polysyllabic medical terminology to the crudest of slang. It includes one word invented by the author: “eyedema”, meaning the bags under your eyes (from “edema”, which means “swelling”).

Hodgson even discusses the lines read by palmists, though there’s an error in the entry for “head line”: the word “linen” comes not from “line” but from Greek linos, which means “flax”. Which makes you wonder a bit about the Linos who was the son of Apollo, but that’s another story. This caught my eye because I was reading the lambda section in my Greek dictionary the other day, and I verified the etymology of “linen” at etymonline.com, because I’m such a natural-born pedant that I can’t keep from doing things like that.

My biggest laugh so far has been the emoticons based on the word “ass.” Somehow, despite being online since 1985, I had never encountered these.

Carnal Knowledge is a highly entertaining and informative book. For a dictionary, it’s a surprisingly quick read. Amazon says it will be available as of August 7th, but you can pre-order it now. If you want to bone up on your anatomy, pick up a copy and start thumbing through it.

Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia. St Martin’s Press, New York, 2007.

etymology linguistics english dictionary

Yes! And no.

Since I offer visitors to my website the prospect of a book in 3-6 months, I thought I should address the questions of when, whether, and how it’s possible to produce a full-length book so quickly.

At the recent BACN Publishing Panel, Dr. Bette Daoust said that it takes her 32 hours to write a book. You could hear the gasps of astonishment from the audience. She quickly qualified the statement by pointing out three things:

1. That time is only for writing, not for research or editing. The research (gathering of relevant articles) may take months, not counting the years of experience that create the author’s expertise.
2. It takes 32 hours to write the first draft. Few writers actually want their first drafts published.
3. As the author of 150 books, Dr. Daoust is a practiced writer; first-time authors can expect to spend three times that on their first draft, even if they have all their ducks in a row.

When I was a young, energetic graduate student, I researched and wrote a 300,000 word quasi-historical fantasy adventure novel during our four-month summer break. That’s several times as long as any business book. (In fact, 300,000 words is really too long to be one novel; I decided a few years later, when I got nowhere with publishers, to divide it into two books and add a couple of chapters to the shorter section, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

Even though I’m not young and energetic anymore, generating reams of text is not a problem—as long as I know in advance what I want to say.

Start by Proposing

That’s where the research comes in. Whether you’re writing your own book or someone else’s, you have to gather a lot of source material before starting to write. You also have to go through the proposal process, to find out who the book’s intended market is, what the author’s goal for the book is, which books are comparable, etc and so on. I advise even authors who know from the beginning that they’re going to self-publish to write book proposals, because by the time you’ve done all that preparation, actually writing the book is almost an afterthought.

It can take longer to create a good proposal, with its marketing plan, hook, handle, outline, and sample chapters, than it does to write the rest of the book. Again, it depends on how well-prepared you are. Patricia Fry, author of How to Write a Successful Book Proposal in 8 Days or Less, explains the value of book proposals on WBJB Radio and Authors Access.

Source Material

Part of preparing to write—and thus being able to write quickly—is getting your source material together. You might collect relevant magazine articles and web pages over the course of a few months. Make sure you have them where you can get to them, and that you go over them to decide where you want to include them. You should also collect any short articles you’ve published that you want to include or expand on. And if you have illustrations or figures of any kind already picked out, you’ll need to get those together, as well.

If you have recordings of yourself giving presentations and leading workshops, get them transcribed. If you don’t have them, start making them. They’ll save you from reinventing the wheel. You can get a digital recorder for less than $100; for a little more, you can get one that comes bundled with voice-to-text software. (This technology is much better than it used to be, but you’ll still need a human to go over and correct it.) If you want, you can produce your entire first draft by talking rather than writing.

If you’re working with a ghostwriter, s/he will probably record interviews with you, as well as making use of any recordings or transcriptions you already have. It can be useful to hear the original audio as well as having the text to work with, but you’ll almost certainly lose time and money if you ask your ghostwriter to do the transcription. There are specialized services that will do it faster and cheaper if you don’t want to go the software route.

If, instead of planning for a few years to write before you sit down at your keyboard, you get struck by a mental lightning bolt one day and conclude that you need a book now, you can condense your research and preparation period. It may mean some long days at the library and on the Internet, not to mention in front of the microphone, either presenting to an audience or getting interviewed by a writer, but you should be able to manage the research inside a month if you can take time off from your regular business to do so.

Time Off

One reason many authors decide they really don’t need a book in 3 months, or even 6, is the fact that they have businesses to run, or day jobs, which mean they can’t devote long hours to writing. Of course, that’s also one reason to hire a ghostwriter, but as long as you want it to be your book, you have to put time in on it. So you might take a couple of weeks off to fill in the gaps in your research and to do interviews, then hand your source material to the writer.

After that, you can concentrate on your work for the next month while s/he writes the first draft. Then you’ll need at least another week or two off in order to make revisions, unless you don?t require sleep. And so on through as many revisions as the book requires (at least one more).

So that’s at least two months. Once you think of the book as “finished,” you’ll need to give the manuscript, preferably in hard copy, to someone who’s never seen it before. This can be a professional proofreader, or just a friend with an eagle eye and a handy red pen. You’ll be amazed at how many typos and other small errors you, your writer, and the spelling checker missed.

Once you fix those last problems (and the ghostwriter, or even your assistant, can on that part for you), you can turn the book over to the publisher, designer,or book packager. If you’re self-publishing, either via Print on Demand or through a more traditional printer, you need to have someone do the layout and typesetting. It’s best to hire someone who is experienced with book design—both the principles and the software—rather than an all-purpose graphic designer. If you’re working with a traditional publisher, they’ll take care of this part for you. (I can recommend a book designer, if you’re looking for one.)

A Real-Life Example

It took me 60 hours to do the first draft of a client’s book, using her blog posts as raw material; that would be just about exactly a month for me if I were working on it “full time.” But I wasn?t working on it full time, and neither was she. She actually started writing the blog in August of 2005 and concluding in October of 2006. Writing the blog posts took her roughly 1-2 hours apiece.

I started collecting and organizing the blog posts at the end of 2005 and finished the first draft in June of 2007. A lot of what both of us did during that process was eliminate duplication. She’d made several points in more than one blog post, and we needed to consolidate all that material. If she?d written all of them at once, it would have been easier for her to remember what she?d already covered—but impossible for her to do any work for her clients.

She then put in 6 hours a day reviewing and revising that first draft, and sent it back to me on July 8th, 2007. It took only until July 15th (less than 12 hours of actual billed time) for me to read over the second draft, make corrections, and send back the third draft.

Now the publisher, who is also acting as proofreader, is asking for a number of changes in the details, so it may be a few more weeks before the book goes to press. (When it does, I’ll be sure to announce it here so that you can buy it.)

The Bottom Line

My total time on this project, including some research, was 78 hours. My client’s time was probably double that, or more. (Since she wasn’t billing it out, she didn’t track it.) Spread over the course of 18 months, it was a manageable task and a manageable expense. The book, at 110,000 words, is on the longer side; you can get away with half that for a business book, if you can say what you need to say.

If we hadn’t taken breaks in between working on the book, we might have spent fewer total hours on it due to the momentum of staying immersed in the material.

Nevertheless, 78 hours is a fairly quick job. My client saved herself money by investing so much time on the project herself. A typical ghostwriting project, which involves quite a lot of interviewing and research time as well as the writing and revising, can easily take 200 hours. Any collection of source material is going to need consolidating. Writing someone else’s book can be more time-consuming than writing your own, and sometimes revising a client’s first draft also takes longer than just writing it yourself.

But if I do the math on 200 hours, that’s still only 4 months, beginning to end, if I work on that book to the exclusion of everything else. And my client might need one week off each of those months to devote to the book, and another couple of weeks after my job is done to handle issues of publishing and printing.

Marketing time, of course, is something else entirely. But as the person whose name is on the book, you’re the one who has to do most of the marketing.

The Writing and Publishing for Consultants panel at the July meeting of the Bay Area Consultants Network was a great success. You can download the handout with links to publishing resources from the BACN website.

Here is the list of questions addressed by panelists Patricia Coate, Dr. Bette Daoust, and Karen Pierce Gonzalez (with a few interjections from moderator Sallie Goetsch (Yours Truly), and some help from the audience):

• Why publish at all? What’s in it for consultants?
• What’s the most important thing consultants need to know about publishing?
• What are the different options for publishing a book and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

• Traditional (large) publisher
• Self-Publishing
• Print on Demand (POD)

• How much should I plan on spending on…
• Writing & Editing
• Design/Layout/Printing
• Marketing
• What kind of help can I get with writing and publishing a book?
• Help with writing
• Editing, proofreading, formatting
• Marketing and selling
• How do you get your articles published in print magazines and trade journals?
• What’s the best way to write and publish articles online for lead generation?
• How do you create and use white papers?
• How much can you re-use your material?
• How do you track article placement?
• Where do I find interesting, relevant topics to write about? Does my material have to be original?

We recorded the entire panel, and you can click to play below or download the MP3 file to put on your portable media player. The recording is just over an hour long—not nearly time enough!

 
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