ARE YOU READY TO WORK? THE BUSINESS OF WRITING AND BOOK EDITING

If you haven’t already, pre-order my book editing client Christian Picciolini’s memoir, “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.” It is the profound [true] tale of a neo-Nazi skinhead in the late 80s in Chicago who jumps into the white power movement at 14 and gets out at twenty-two. After the depression, he found out he’d been duped, and who he really was. In 2010 he co-founded “Life After Hate,” a non-profit that helps youth disentangle from gangs and teaches non-violence, love, anti-racism, anti-bullying, acceptance and tolerance of all people, regardless of race, religion, sexual preferences, etc. He is dedicated to basic human goodness. The book comes out April 28, 2015. Pre-order now. Check out his personal website HERE. The foreword to the book is by Joan Jett, the famous rock musician.

In other news, I will be at the Tri-Valley Writers Conference in Pleasanton, Calif, on Saturday, April 18. If you’re interested in attending the conference, click HERE. Come out for a full day of agent and editor panels, the perspective from New York City publishers, and meeting new, aspiring and established writers and authors who you can form lifetime connections with. Come out and enjoy the fun! It’s looking like I will also be attending the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City July 31st-August 2nd. I went last year and had a great time.

Furthermore, I have finally begun to recover from the San Francisco Writers Conference 2015 (SFWC), which was Feb 12-16, a couple of weeks ago now. I met TONS of writers, authors, agents, editors, publishers, etc. As usual I enjoyed the panels and talks and meeting new potential clients and co-writers and feeling “a part of.” As a lone, solitary writer, I find it sometimes very satisfying to come out into the fray with other people who are more or less on the same literary page as I am and to discuss craft and commerce in a friendly atmosphere. Most of the year we are all “in the cave” so to speak, and it is always nice to walk out into the sunshine and realize we aren’t completely alone. At least not in spirit.

I don’t really have an agenda on this blog post other than to say, if you’re a writer who takes his or her craft seriously, then take the necessary steps to make sure you do what needs to be done in order to make it to the next logical level in your writing career. Too vague? What I mean is this: If you are a newer writer who feels they want to succeed in this industry, then take a couple of concrete suggestions:

• Write every single day. (Even if it’s only for 15 minutes. Literally. It’s about forming the habit. It’s like smoking, only healthy for you.)

• Read a lot. (King says a writer must read a lot and write a lot. For real.)

• Go to writers’ conferences. (Google “writers conferences.” If you’re in a major city, there are some around you throughout the year; trust me. But they’re so expensive, you say. Deal with it. These are so worth the cost. You meet tons of industry professionals.)

• Use beta readers for your book and make sure it has gone through multiple (like 4/5 at least) rounds/drafts before even considering a developmental book editor. Do not have two people read it and then start submitting it to an agent. Trust me.

• When you HAVE had 5/6 beta readers critique it and you’ve gone through that process, and then you hire a freelance book editor to edit/revise it, and then you finally feel it is “ready,” then hire a copy editor and/or a proofreader. And THEN, at last, after that phase, then you can start working on the query and synopsis (for fiction). (For nonfiction the project doesn’t have to be completed yet and you use a proposal.)

• Take your time when writing your query letter. Like your book, have others critique it and/or hire an editor to review it and make suggestions for how to improve it. Check Chuck Sambuchino’s website and the GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS book (now in its 24th edition, for 2015) to see how to properly write a query letter. Think 3 paragraphs: a) About the book (word count, genre, title, hook sentence); b) mini-synopsis of the book; c) about the author (works published, platform, degrees, etc). Keep it one page or less. Make sure you research the said agent and get the name right and use a hook sentence that refers to one of their clients’ books. Impress them, and show that you did your homework.

***So anyway, the above are just examples of little, simple things you can do to increase your chances of landing an agent and proceeding onto the next rung of your writing career. Try to have patience (nothing in this industry happens overnight) and regard for others along the same path. Try to gain self-esteem as a writer by creating your strongest work, using beta readers, hiring an editor, and only sending to agents when you are 100% sure you’ve gotten your project as far as you possibly can on your own. When you reach that stage, that’s the sign that yes, you need an agent and that, most likely, you are actually prepared for one.

Remember, in 2015 the book market is overflowing with wannabe “writers” who have gotten it into their heads—due in part to the proliferation, since the 1970s, of MFA programs and the rise in popularity of writing in this country—that they want, need and “deserve” to have their books sold at major book stores across the globe. They want a rock-star agent with massive NYC contacts who will not only sell their book to Penguin-Random for a six-figure, 3-book deal, but will also sell the foreign rights, the film rights, and the audio rights, and that, before the burgeoning author knows it, they’ll be the next J.K. Rowling, making a billion dollars a year. Well, unfortunately, 99.9% of those “writers” are in for a real reality-check. This is no walk in the literary park. Writing and the business of selling your writing is NOT an easy task, and it is not for the faint of heart or for those who are lazy or give up easily.

Writing and the industry it has become are giant, tall hurdles that prevent the majority from ever getting in. Is it impossible? Hell no. But it does require time, work, money, energy, and patience. If you have those to spare (plus a day job), then please contact me for book editing. Because I love nothing more than to help a writer “make it,” whatever that may mean to you.

Are you ready to work?

“You said it. Let’s edit.”

Write on.

Michael Mohr

#writing #writersconference

CHRISTIAN PICCIOLINI: 'WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Mov

Pre-order my client Christian Picciolini’s book, “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.” (NOW BEING RE-RELEASED DEC 26, 2017 AS WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement—and How I Got Out.) It comes out April 28, 2015. I worked with this guy—a real live ex neo-Nazi skinhead turned social activist and lover of everybody—for a year on developmental and copy editing, honing the story down to its sharpest edge. An incredible tale (taking place in Chicago), the memoir follows Christian as he goes from being a shy, innocent, reclusive teenager—from a nice middleclass family but with immigrant Italian, career-obsessed parents—to being pulled into the neo-Nazi skinhead movement by none other than Clark Martell, the first American neo-Nazi skinhead ever.

Jumping in at 14, by 16 he was operating major skinhead cells in the northern U.S. Muammar Gaddafi even at one point offered to “fund” a skinhead race war against the Jews. An enemy of the enemy is a friend. Amidst all of this he stockpiled weapons to prepare for the inevitable race war, was an honor roll student and star athlete despite being kicked out of four high schools, and was the lead singer in the first white power rock band to ever play in Europe. At 21, after having gotten married, bought a house, and having two kids, he was suddenly jarred out of his delirium. He lost it all. His wife, kids, home, his business (a record store), his sanity and self-image. Staring into the eyes of his children meant he could no longer look at his own eyes in the mirror. In 1995, he hit bottom. After years of debilitating depression, he started playing music again, starting a non-racist band. That band toured with Joan Jett.

In 1999, Christian was hired by IBM, doing marketing and operations. He later went back to school and landed a degree in International Business and International Relations from DePaul University. Picciolini began his own global record label and artist development firm, and was appointed a member of the Chicago Grammy Rock Music Committee and the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival. In 2010 and 2011, he was nominated for three regional Emmy Awards for his role as executive producer of JBTV, one of America’s longest-running, nationally-broadcast music television programs.

He has worked as an Adjunct Professor at the college level, and as the Community Partnerships Manager for Threadless, a company that combines a thriving online art community with a highly successful e-commerce business model. Additionally, in 2013, he contributed to Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas Jared Cohen’s New York Times Best Seller, The New Digital Age. Most notably, in 2010 he co-founded Life After Hate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping communities and organizations gain the knowledge necessary to implement long-term solutions that counter all types of racism and violent extremism. He is an explorer by nature; he loves to learn new things and thrives on challenging himself with “positive disruptive thinking.” He values kindness, unselfishness, sincerity, and respect for all people, and believes that small ideas can change the world.

Christian, as you can see, is quite an incredible human being and is definitely part of the global solution. He has attended global UN peace talks, worked on spreading info on the Millennium Development Goals, and works with Life After Hate to help extricate youth from hate, anger, and racism. Features about Christian and “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead” have recently appeared in VICE Magazine, NOISEY, One people’s Project, Broadway World (BWW).com, The Beachwood Reporter, and The Sound of Hate (89.3 KPCC with pat Morrison), as well as others. WBEZ, a Chicago-based radio station did an interview. He was even broadcast on the Glen Beck Program, a national TV news and political opinion show.

Please check out Christian’s website and pre-order “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead.” If you like what you read—and you’ve written a novel or memoir—please consider hiring me as your book editor. Check my site under “Editing Services” for rates and more info on my editing. If you have further questions, please email me: michaelmohreditor@gmail.com.

In addition, you agents out there, Christian and I are seeking agent representation. Christian is active on all forms of social media, does national speaking tours with LAH, and has been on magazine and radio media, both online and print publication. Please contact me at michaelmohreditor@gmail.com if you have interest in seeing the query letter or the manuscript itself.

I, too, as a writer, have my own suspense manuscript that is close to being ready for submission to literary agents. Active on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, and using this blog/website for traction (I receive 5-6,000 unique visits per month), I feel I am prepared to launch my book once it is ready for agent view. A former literary agent’s assistant, I am a published short story writer (www.alfiedog.com), and a freelance book editor.

Please buy one of my stories at www.alfiedog.com (Alfie Dog Press) for 66 cents a pop. They are short, fun little tales of debauchery.

My mother’s novel, “The Road at My Door,” (Lori Windsor Mohr) is going to be forthcoming from Alfie Dog Press (a U.K. publisher) as well. I will keep you updated as to when that novel will be coming out. Please keep your eyes open for it. A tale of 1960s drama, a local Catholic priest steals a young female narrator’s mother away from the family. A father who has gone into near-catatonic denial (and stopped being an adult), a teenage sister who has fled to South America to be with the boy who impregnated her, Reece (the narrator/protagonist) is left all by herself to suffer the terrible consequences of living alone and in fear of her world crumbling around her. In the end, the only one who can save her is herself. Drawing on internal strength from reading the book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, Reece finally discovers that she has more character, more will, and more strength inside of her than she ever imagined possible.

“You said it, let’s edit.”

Write on.

Michael Mohr

#romanticviolence #picciolini

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR BOOK TO AGENTS

Well, I hope all who attended the San Francisco Writers Conference (SFWC) 2015 last week, Feb 12-16, enjoyed it and got a lot out of the event. I know I did. As a book editor, I met many writers who I had the unique privilege of speaking with in depth about their various projects. And it looks like I will be working with at least a few of you, though my turnaround is becoming longer as I take on more clients.

At the conference—my 4th year in a row at the SFWC—writers were able to participate in the Agent Speed Dating sessions, where for 51 minutes a group of writers were unleashed upon tired yet mostly friendly literary agents in 3-minute increments to pitch their novel or nonfiction book. Through the doors of “The Room of the Dons” we walked, prepared to scratch and fight our way to the agent of choice, sitting in a chair across from the agent at a small round table, mostly terrified and wanting it to just be over as quickly as possible.

In 2013, I did the agent pitch and walked away with 7 requests for the ms, mostly the full. All those became rejections, and that book was filed away in a drawer under “Not going to happen.” It’s still, unfortunately, in that drawer, which John Lescroart, famous best-selling author and SFWC keynote speaker, said was a big mistake for him, referring to a novel he had in his drawer for 14 years before it saw the literary light of day and became a bestseller.

But in 2013 I fared well with the pitch, not so well with the submission itself, which is not an uncommon thing. This time—2015—I came to the conference (and the pitch session) more as a freelance book editor and less as a writer. I handed out my editing cards by the dozen. I chatted with aspiring writers of all ages, races, genders, and careers. I even pitched my client Christian Picciolini’s brilliant, touching, powerful memoir, “Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead,” which comes out April 28, 2015. Please check him out. With a foreword by the famous rock star Joan Jett, this is going to be a phenomenal book. Pre-order your copy here. Andy Ross—literary agent who lives in Oakland, near me, and is the former owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, an infamous bookstore around since the 60s—wants to see my work, as does Gordon Warnock, literary agent with Fuse Literary, another Bay Area agency.

So the point of me telling you all this is: Writers’ conferences are a fantastic way to make connections, meet other local writers (and non-local ones who you can keep in contact with through email and Skype), introduce yourself and your project/book to agents, and mainly be around publishing and editing professionals and successful writers who have already been making their mark on the industry. You can learn and inhale and absorb the writing discipline and drive and focus that these people have, and learn more about how things work in this scene, especially from the point of view of New York City, where things still center, though obviously agents and publishers are all over the country at this point, and they all fly yearly to NYC to meet with agents, editors, and publishers so they can stay in the know and keep those connections with pub house acquisitions editors fresh.

A few suggestions for you writers who received Agent Speed Dating requests for your ms (whether a partial or full ms request): In the email subject-line, make sure you write “Requested materials SFWC 2015, Agent Speed Dating, first 50 pp.” Make sure you stay out of the slush pile death list by labeling properly. Also, more importantly, really, hold off for a few days or even weeks or, sometimes, months, if you are not fully ready. If that ms is not as tight as it can possibly be…hold off. You have a magic opportunity here: The agent has specifically told you that you can send material to them directly. That’s gold. But…don’t mess it up! Seriously.

Do this:

• Read Chuck Sambuchino’s “Guide to Literary Agents 2015” (just the part about writing the query and how to write a killer first chapter and the “what not to do when submitting to an agent” part). Trust me; you won’t regret this.

• Hire a book editor if you have any lingering doubts about the strength of your ms. Seriously. If you are feeling not confident about the book, hire a professional. It could mean the difference between acceptance and rejection. If you need to wait to send for 3 or 6 months, it’s worth every penny and every hour. Get it right the first time. Typos, starting your chapter one the wrong way, clichés, bad/lazy writing, and any other number of things could earn you a stiff rejection. Be smart.

• Make sure those first 3 chapters are freaking TIGHT. Don’t over-edit, but make sure the first 3 chaps demonstrate your voice, tone, setting, stakes, plot-direction, and have conflict, tension, and that we cannot, simply CANNOT put that bastard down. We must keep reading; we must move to page 2, chapter 3, whatever.

• Don’t use any gimmicks in your query. Google how to write a query letter, follow Chuck’s example, and keep it short and to-the-point. We’re talking 250-300 words tops; 3 paragraphs: 1) The book (genre, word-count, title, and a first sentence “hook”); 2) the mini synopsis of the book’s plot, told in the tone/voice of the narrator; 3) The author bio (publications, awards, writing grad school, etc). Again: Keep this one-page tops. Even in email, agents can tell.

• Follow the agents’ guidelines PRECISELY. When I was an agent’s assistant, I cannot tell you how many times we were forced to reject a manuscript simply because they didn’t follow the protocol. Follow the rules, and you are more likely to succeed.

That’s all for this week. I had a great time connecting with you all at the conference, and those who didn’t attend, I hope to see you at the SFWC 2016! It’ll be here before we know it! Please find me on Twitter at @Michael_Editor, on Facebook at “Author Michael Mohr” and buy my stories at Alfie Dog Press (for 66 cents each): click on the Alfie Dog logo on the home page of this website.

If you are seeking professional book editing I may be your man. I am booking up quick so if you need a full ms edited please contact me right away. My turnaround right now is looking more like June/July, 2015. Possibly I can return the ms a little earlier, if things happen to fall into place. Hey, what can I say: I’m a sought-after book editor :)

Take care. Write on. “You said it, let’s edit.”

Michael Mohr

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My client (ex neo-Nazi skinhead who changed his life and founded “Life After Hate”): www.christianpicciolini.com

My short stories: www.alfiedog.com

Twitter: @Michael_Editor

#agentqueryliteraryagent