Caroline Howard-Johnson Transcript

March 29, 2008

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is March 28th. It is almost April, the first day of spring. It is a beautiful day outside. Foggy, rainy, but its warm. Four guests on the show today. The last guest, of course, is an author sound, Doyle Lawson. His famous band, Quicksilver, has been around for a long, long time.Then I have three authors on the show. First author is Caroline Howard-Johnson, with her books about writing books. My second guest is Jim Olson with his novel “An Eagle Unchained”. My third guest is another novelist with her book, “Every Last Cuckoo”.Welcome to the show to Caroline Howard-Johnson. She has a long resume with a whole bunch of amazing achievements in the world of writing. Her website is carolynhowardjohnson.redenginepress.com. Welcome to the show.

Caroline Howard-Johnson: Hi. Thanks a lot for having me!

Dr. Kent: And I’m sure you have a bunch of other websites as well.

Caroline: My favorite one is easy. It is howtodoitfrugally.com.

Dr. Kent: howtodoitfrugally.com.

Caroline: Easy to remember.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about your whole method. You have a couple books out recently. They’re to help authors with what they do.

Caroline: Yep. They do. I certainly hope they do, and it seems that they are from the mail I get. They’re in the How to do it Frugally series of books for writers. They came about because I’m, at heart, a novelist and short story writer and poet. As your author listeners will know, those are the hardest books of all to get people to read, especially if the novel is a literary novel.I fell into all kinds of potholes. I had a publicist background, and I wanted to help writers combat the same problems that I had. I also wanted a text that was really practical for my classes at UCLA. So my first book in the series was “The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won’t.” The second was just released. It is called “The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward To Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success.”

Dr. Kent: Let’s talk a little bit about the first one, “The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won’t.” Most folks that aren’t in the publishing industry don’t know that a great deal of the books that do get accepted, they go through that whole sieve. They end up being asked to be on a press and all of that, and then they get published, and what happens? It sits on the shelves. Tell us a little bit about that.

Caroline: Exactly. And that’s exactly what happened to my first novel. It is called “This is the Place.” It was published traditionally. I was living the myth two decades ago that my publisher would do it for me. It is set in Salt Lake City. It was published just before the winter Olympics there. I thought it was going to be a big seller, and it just wasn’t doing anything and I didn’t quite understand why.Luckily I did have a publicist’s background, so I just started researching ways that I could get the word out there. Of course, book promotion is a lot different from fashion promotion, which is what I had done before, so I had a heck of a lot to learn.That book is just simply a compilation of all the things I tried, all the resources I found, put very simply and in a light language so that people can read it easily. People who aren’t yet really familiar with the publishing industry.

Dr. Kent: How about the age-old… “This book is going to make it onto Oprah”?

Caroline: Well, I think that you can probably put your energies into a lot better channels if you’re on a limited budget or if you don’t have an awful lot of time. The chances are very, very slim. I never like to be discouraging. If that’s your dream and you’re an author, hey, go for it. But if you’re budgeting your time as well as your money, the net is just open to about any kind of an effort you want to make. So are many radio shows like yours. I think those are the best places.Also speaking and teaching are good ways to get the news about your book out to the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oprah chooses one book to feature in, I don’t know, a hundred thousand that are submitted to her every year.

Dr. Kent: What is the connection between your first book, “Frugal Book Promoter” and your second book now, “The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward To Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success.” Tell us a little bit about that one.

Caroline: In the meantime, I started editing a lot of people’s books. I found that people were really submitting awful material. Not in terms of editing. Things written… Not necessarily grammatical errors. Not necessarily typos. But they were writing the way they’d been taught to write in high school. Writing has changed since many of us were in high school. Fiction is different from writing a high school essay. So is poetry different from the way it was written in the days of the classics, the poetry that we studied. On and on…I became concerned that that very first line of offense that we authors have, the very first time that we present ourselves to a publisher or an editor or whatever, is really extremely poorly edited. So I wrote “The Frugal Editor.” I consider it almost a marketing book also because that is your first effort. Your first presentation to what I call the gate keepers, the people who can say yes or no to your work.

Dr. Kent: So what is the difference between… I know you’re talking both about what they used to call vanity presses or self-published process, and then you’re also talking about approaching the big ones.

Caroline: Yes. I believe that there’s probably the right place for every book for every book and every author, and no one place is right. In other words, traditional presses like Simon & Schuster, really publishers, are wonderful. If that’s where an author’s heart is, maybe that’s where they should try to go first. They need an agent for that.But there are lots of other ways to publish now. Thank heaven, in the last decade we’ve come a long way. Some books are really better published on a POD press, self-published, or with help. Those are called subsidy publishers. So we’re not at the mercy of an agent or a large publisher anymore. There are all kinds of roots. And some of those other roots are becoming very well respected unlike the Vanity Presses of even the 1950s. Some are far more profitable and some are better suited to say a how-to book, than others.So if people do their homework, they can be published. I just want them to be published properly edited. [laughs]

Dr. Kent: Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of that. How much… in your book you talked about how do I do this?

Caroline: How to get published?

Dr. Kent: Well…

Caroline: That’s the next one in a group of series. [laughs]

Dr. Kent: Well not even how to get published, the editing. How do you break open…?

Caroline: Well, you start off learning to write a terrific query letter because obviously that query letter is what you’re going to be using to approach agents if you do want to be traditionally published as an example. And a query letter is simply a letter asking people to do what you like an agent to represent you. And it must actually ask that question, a lot of people neglect to do that. They’re not used to asking for what they want. They almost intentionally avoid saying “I’d like you to represent me.”Beyond that there’s a format you can find, a pretty good format in “Writers Digest Market”. The front of the book usually has some samples. There are samples of good query letters in both the “Frugal Editor” and the “Frugal Book Promoter”. And from there on you keep using query letters add in tonight until your book is dead and shredded. Because you’re going to continue to use them when you approach contest judges, when you approach editors for feature stories, when you approach radio hosts like you, you need to be able to write a good query letter.

Dr. Kent: Now how about… there’s a whole bunch of presses out there that almost like…I guess they’re sort of preying on unsuspecting first time authors. What do you think about those companies?

Caroline: Well, I think that the looser the publishing industry has become the more scam artists there are. There are also a lot of so-called agents. There are a lot of so-called editors; the “Frugal Editor” tells people how to choose an editor for their book so they don’t run afoul of somebody who has just published one book and poorly and now calls themselves an editor. There’s a lot of that.And we do need to be wary. I guess it’s a capitalist system. It’s that buyer beware system. We need to know what we’re doing. We need to do our homework and there are lots of really good books out there that will help authors, perspective authors, others who want to have a published book do it right.

Dr Kent: That, well, is a fascinating discussion. Can you give me a… can you tell me who your audience is for these? Are you selling to publishers? Are you selling to the authors themselves?

Caroline: That’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that question.

Dr Kent: [laughs]

Caroline: Actually yes, as a good marketer I try to sell to whomever is interested. I sell to publishers. They sometimes buy the book in quantity and then give them to their authors because obviously if their authors know how to promote and know how to edit than that’s going to make their job easier.I sell directly to authors. I sell online at Amazon. I sell to beginning authors. People who have been around a long time still find my book really amazingly helpful because a lot of times they’ve been around a long time and they haven’t picked up the finer points of either promotion or editing. So really, they’re there for authors and publishers and anyone in the publishing industry.

Dr Kent: Wonderful. Well, you have a whole bunch of connections as well. How have you been received by the market? You’ve received the Best Books Award winner…?

Caroline: Yeah, isn’t that exciting? I really believe in awards. I believe it’s an excellent promotion device and it doesn’t have to be a huge award. I’ve been lucky. Both of my frugal books have been named USA Book News, Best Book of the Year, so that’s a prestigious award.But they don’t have to be prestigious awards for an author to use them. Small awards, runners up, finalists, honorable mention, all will help set an author’s book apart from the other ones that are sitting on a bookstore shelf. If there are two books on a similar subject and a book buyer goes in to purchase a book they may not know exactly which book they want and if one has won an award that tells them something. I really believe in going after awards and the “Frugal Book Promoter” has a list of awards and places that authors can go to actually apply for awards.

Dr Kent: I have a question that my producer and I both have. Your name is Howard- Johnson, any relation to the hotel chain?

Caroline: No orange roof here, no, no. Howard was my maiden name and then Johnson is my married name. There’s an interesting story about when I went into journalism when I was very young about how they couldn’t put that whole Howard-Johnson into Caroline, Howard-Johnson is a very long name, into a one-column byline. So I made a hyphen, which made it my real name, and they had to figure out a way so they just ended up using two lines for my byline, which was very sneaky for a young girl of 19 in the 50s. [laughs]

Dr Kent: Very sneaky. Well, this has been wonderful to chat about editing and about publicity. Give us a ten second sound bite about your books and about your website.

Caroline: OK. I’d like everyone to take advantage of the experience spoke of. Experience both practical experience and my past as a publisher and marketer. Read my books before they start on their trek to publishing. If you haven’t read that kind of a book read mine, read John Cramer’s, read Dan Pointer’s, but please do read!And find me at www.howtodoitfrugally.com where you’ll also find lots of resources outside my book.