The Art of the Author Photo

Laura Stanfill, photographed by Brian McDonnell of BMAC Studio.

Like many people, I prefer being behind the camera. That’s why I was thrilled (and a little terrified) when Christi Krug invited me to a portrait photo session with fellow author and entrepreneur Edee Lemonier.

It was time to get some professional pictures for Forest Avenue Press, my new small press, and for my online author presence. My headshot for the past year or so was makeup free and cropped from a documentary pregnancy picture. It was cute, and very me, but it wasn’t particularly professional.

When the three of us arrived at Brian McDonnell’s beautiful studio in Portland on a recent weekday, he  started chatting, asking us questions and making us feel comfortable. Edee, Christi, and I took turns being photographed by Brian, listening to his prompts and stories, and enjoying his enthusiasm when we struck an interesting expression or pose. When we weren’t being photographed, Christi, Edee and I sat on comfy couches and visited with each other.

Brian’s energy was astonishing. He spent an intense hour with each of us over the course of three hours, talking us into our true selves so those selves showed up in the photographs. He stood, paced, and even danced with the camera in his hand. For those three hours, as we took turns in front of the lens, I didn’t think about deadlines or sending out review copies. I didn’t think about my email list or my grocery list. The outside world stayed outside, and I found myself sitting, and breathing, and being.

Thank you, Brian, for your time, for how much of yourself you poured into documenting me and my writer friends, and for capturing my inner Jersey girl, my newfound publisher confidence, and my bubbly everyday self.

Good News in Author-Land

At the opening of her exhibit at PCC-Sylvania last month, artist and writer Julia Stoops visits with Jackie Shannon Hollis, another writer.

It seems like after many years of hard work, staring down the blank page, a number of my writer-friends have been getting recognized for their talents. There has been so much good news in my community lately.

For instance, my longtime writing friend Amber Krieger was interviewed in Carve this week.

Her story, “It Was So Long Ago,” was chosen as Editor’s Choice in 2010, and it was recently picked for a Story Spotlight. Read “It Was So Long Ago” here.

I remember hearing parts of this story at the Pinewood Table critique group, a local seminar-like writing circle co-taught by Joanna Rose and Stevan Allred for twenty-some years. In the interview, Amber talks about how the story developed, what the Editor’s Choice designation meant to her writing career, and her recent publications, which include having an essay in Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life, the anthology I edited and published in 2012.

Other recent good news includes Julia Stoops‘ art exhibit at Portland Community College-Sylvania (see photo); Christi Krug’s release of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough; Marcia Riefer Johnston’s release of Word Up!: How to Write Powerful Paragraphs and Sentences (And Everything You Build from Them); Liz Scott and Bridget Harwell’s new book Lies: The Truth about the Self-Deception That Limits Your Life; and the release of the paperback version of Jon Bell’s On Mount Hood. I’ll likely revisit some of these achievements in more depth in coming weeks and months; it has been hard to keep up with so much positivity while working on deadline to get Stevan Allred’s book out.

(Yes, the Stevan Allred who taught Amber and me at the Pinewood Table. And that’s a whole other story, going from fledgling novelist to gatekeeper, and it’s a story that I have now written in essay form for a literary journal, and I’ll let you know when it’s out. Speaking of more good news.)

Whose successes and achievements are you celebrating these days? Feel free to share links!

The Paradise Guest House

It was great fun to hear bestselling author Ellen Sussman read from her new book, The Paradise Guest House, and discuss terrorism, book covers, doing research, how Bali has changed, the Boston Marathon bombings, and the publishing industry, at Annie Bloom’s Bookstore in Portland last Wednesday night.

I’m excited to read Ellen’s book and was so grateful for the chance to chat with her thanks to our mutual friend, author Liz Prato.

You can listen to Leigh Anne Kranz’s wonderful interview with Ellen Sussman on KBOO’s Between the Covers program, and here are a few photos from the evening.

Two of my writing friends, Yuvi Zalkow and Steve Arndt, attended Ellen Sussman’s reading.

I had a chance to visit with Christi Krug, author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough.

Liz Prato is one of the most thoughtful people I know, and I’m so glad she’s part of my writing community.

The amazing Ellen Sussman regaled the Annie Bloom’s audience with tales of Bali, publishing, and a scene from her new book, The Paradise Guest House.

Spring at the Rhododendron Garden

This gallery contains 13 photos.

The State of the Small Press in Portland

As a brand new small press, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to listen to some local small press gurus talk about their publishing experiences Friday night at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Southeast Portland.

“The state of the small press in Portland is strong,” said moderator Justin Hocking of the IPRC. He cited the fact that all four guests—Rhonda Hughes of Hawthorne Books, Cameron Pierce of Lazy Fascist Press, Kevin Sampsell of Future Tense Books, and Michael Heald of Perfect Day Publishing—are publishing work that pushes the envelope, and he encouraged writers and readers to continue supporting small presses and buying their work. Then each of the publishers talked about their companies, their philosophies, and answered questions.

Kevin Sampsell

Kevin Sampsell started as a “very lo-fi” publisher twenty years ago, cutting and pasting text and copying the results at Kinko’s in Spokane. “There’s a lot of opportunity for different presses now, because when I started, the reason I did a lot of chapbooks and not paperbacks is it was too expensive,” he said.

Kevin moved to Portland in 1992 and has earned an exemplary reputation as an author, publisher, and the small press book buyer for Powell’s, where he sees some publishers who do well and others who don’t. Every one of the panelists cited Kevin and the difference his support has made in their publishing careers.

“If every town had a Kevin Sampsell,” Cameron said during a discussion on distribution, “it’d be Christmas every day.”

Initially, Kevin said, he didn’t like print on demand books, because the quality was low, but now that the standards have improved, that technology allows presses to “scrape together a couple hundred bucks” and produce a small run of copies. As a result, he said, there are more small presses, which give writers more visibility. Technology has helped authors and publishers in other ways, too.

“A lot of writers are developing audiences through the Internet,” Kevin said. “We are seeing that more and more.”

When Justin asked him about mistakes new small presses make, Kevin cited those with unrealistic expectations, such as spending too much money up front to print 5,000 books. “They need to start off a little slower and grow their audience a little bit,” he said.

Kevin’s novel, This Is Between Us, is forthcoming from Tin House Books; A Common Pornography, his memoir, was published by HarperPerennial in 2010. Kevin mentioned his own publishing history as an example that authors can move back and forth between small presses and big ones.

Rhonda Hughes

Rhonda Hughes is celebrating the thirteenth year of Hawthorne Books, a literary fiction press based in Portland. Small presses, she said, are all about nurturing their relationships with their authors.

“From my vantage point, small publishing has never been better,” Rhonda said, adding that independent presses are evolving into the role that the big publishers used to have. Small presses foster relationships with their authors and do the kind of editing and publicity that the now-giant conglomerates used to do.

Next year, Hawthorne Books is publishing three well-established authors, Karen Karbo, Ariel Gore, and Tom Spanbauer. One of the interesting effects of the shifts in the industry, Rhonda said, is having more midlist authors move to small presses like Hawthorne, which makes less room for debut authors than there used to be.

When asked about big publishers “poaching” her authors, Rhonda cited Gin Phillips, whose The Well and the Mine won the 2008 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Penguin bought the rights to it soon after that accolade. Monica Drake followed her well-received Clown Girl, published by Hawthorne in 2007, with The Stud Book, released this spring  by Hogarth, part of the Crown Publishing Group. “They’re poaching, but I’m happy about it,” Rhonda said, adding that she’s glad for her authors’ success, and their success also shines a light on the backlist titles.

Michael Heald

Michael Heald founded Perfect Day Publishing while taking the publishing certificate program at the IPRC and has released four books in two years. Love Is Not Constantly reached the top of the Powell’s bestseller list.

“My press exceeded every expectation I’ve had,” he said.

But—to add some reality and a touch of pessimism to the lineup—Michael said he has almost sold out of Lisa Wells’ Yeah. No. Totally. but doesn’t have the money to reprint it. And he’s about to embark on an East Coast tour for his new book, Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension, where he expects to spend more money than what he’ll be able to earn.

Michael, so far, has resisted getting an intern, and he spoke about the press being entirely his own creation. “I don’t accept submissions, because I hate saying no,” he added.

He said his distribution style is close to a zinester’s. Michael has developed personal relationships with a number of independent bookstores that have been very supportive. His books are available in twenty stores in America, not counting all the Portland bookstores, as well as a few in Canada. The stores sell all four of his titles and often highlight them as staff picks.

Cameron Pierce

Cameron Pierce of Lazy Fascist Press, an imprint of Eraserhead Press, warned small presses about expanding too fast or spending too much money on non-essentials, citing the recent struggles of Night Shade Press.

“You can fail in so many ways as a publisher, and you can succeed in so many ways as a publisher,” he said. Cameron said he makes a living through publishing because of keeping costs low, and he also encouraged presses to put readers first, since authors don’t always know what’s best for their books. “I look for authors who are open to that,” he said.

Cameron asked audience members to raise their hands, and the majority identified themselves as writers. “No one can do more for your book than you can,” he told them, adding that marketing money and book reviews don’t matter as much as getting out and selling yourself.

He also weighed in about book distributors during the Q and A session. “They’re not magical leprechauns,” he said. “If they were, the book industry would be doing better.”

Thanks to all the panelists, and the IPRC, for offering such an enlightening discussion in your beautiful space.

Finding Readers: Crowd the Book!

Your book comes out. You promote the heck out of the launch, and then what? That’s the question we’re acknowledging and exploring as part of the Finding Readers series. (Read the first installment here.)

Successful books get noticed long after their debut weeks. Successful books build on the initial hype and keep growing their audience, through word of mouth, publicity, new reviews, and events.

A friend recently told me about Crowd the Book, an innovative new concept that supports small presses and indie authors. Here’s how it works. The folks at Crowd the Book pick a title to “crowd” each month, and then they spread the word about the book and the author, hoping to encourage grassroots support and boost sales and reviews.

May’s selection is Here Is How It Happens, the debut novel by Spencer Dew, released by Ampersand Books in March. You can read more about the book, as well as an author interview, at the Crowd the Book author page.  

I love this concept. It involves that very important curatorship component, where Crowd the Book chooses titles and then advocates for them. It’s a group of people informing other people, “You have to read THIS book.”

My whole goal as a small press publisher is to find a home for worthy fiction by Oregon writers–building a sense of local community along the way with readings, events, and anthologies, while growing a national audience for our authors. Crowd the Book has the same philosophy: to build a sense of community around individual books. To support independent authors and presses. To get beautiful work noticed and appreciated in a world that is much less reading-centric than it used to be.

The Crowd the Book website states 300,000 books are released in America per year. As authors and publishers, that’s a daunting statistic, isn’t it? How does one book–one among those 300,000–find its audience? How does one book get discovered on the shelf or online? How does one small press get its authors the attention they deserve when there are so many mega-titles from mega-publishers being released? Crowd the Book is answering those questions in a positive, community focused way, by doing exactly what it’s doing.

“We’re curators of indie lit,” Crowd the Book’s “About” page explains. “We give indie authors and the small presses that publish them an arena to generate interest and support from people who love indie lit. And we give you a backstage pass with interviews with our authors and their publishers, sneak peeks at their writing studios and more.” 

From the Finding Readers perspective, what could be better? Crowd the Book vocally advocates for one book a month, offering several features and a handy PayPal button for immediate purchase. The titles are hand-selected, much like independent booksellers promoting their picks to customers by setting up tables of favorites and hand-writing “shelf talkers” to share the love. That kind of attention is so amazingly important for the health of small presses, not to mention the individual authors whose work gets applauded.

We’re all in this together, writers, readers, and publishers. Crowd the Book is taking that philosophy and expanding on it, building an online community around one title after the other. It’s a community that’s not based on regionality, or on a particular press, but on quality, and that overall mission to support independent authors and publishers.

If we want others to support us, we need to buy books and support other writers. I encourage you to check out Crowd the Book with a final, inspirational quote from the “About” page: ”Repost updates about the book and get your friends to support the author and help us make a big change for one small author and one small press. If we get enough readers to crowd that book, we’ll give the author the attention and adoration he or she deserves and we’ll give the press enough of a groundswell to publish an extra 1, 2, 3 or even 10 books that year.”

That’s pretty wonderful, whether you’re a reader, a writer, or a publisher.

ARCs!

I’ve been busy prepping advance reader copies of Stevan Allred’s linked short story collection, which is due out in September.

They’re here, they’re here!

We’ve printed the first round of ARCs, or advance reader copies, of Stevan Allred’s A Simplified Map of the Real World, a linked short story collection about a small, rural town. Forest Avenue Press, my small press, is releasing the book on Sept. 12, so this is the time to send copies out to major reviewers, who request them three or four months in advance.

Publishers Weekly, I found out, counts the months from the first day of the month of publication, so we pushed our timeline to make sure theirs would arrive by May 1.

I’ve talked quite a bit about print on demand services, and in particular the Espresso Book Machine at Powell’s. While we’re working with another printer to get A Simplified Map of the Real World distributed more traditionally (and included in the book buying catalogs and Amazon, among others), I’m printing all our ARCs on the Espresso Book Machine. Four of us went over the proof and we made a few minor changes, but we had differing opinions about one potential added feature. So I printed a few with that feature, took a look, and decided absolutely, that was one thing too much in a book packed with extras, such as illustrations, a map of the fictional town of Renata, Oregon, and “story trees” hand-drawn by the author.

Once the decision was made, and a rogue “every” changed back to “ever” in our book club questions guide, I printed a few more. And when those looked good, I placed a bigger order.

The other wonderful thing about printing ARCs through the EBM is that there’s no policy about needing a bar code, unlike the other service we’re working with. Advance readers should never be sold; they cost the publishers a lot of money, they are courtesy copies meant to build buzz, get reviews and blurbs, and generally make people aware that a particular book is forthcoming. If a bookstore sells an ARC and profits off what is essentially a draft, labeled as an uncorrected proof, that’s not fair to the author or publisher, because only the bookstore profits. Nobody gets royalties. And it isn’t very polite.

So I felt very strongly about not printing a bar code on the back cover of our ARC. The other service I’m working with requires a bar code on the back of each book that’s printed. So I could have printed a small run of ARCs, and we could have used an SKU number instead of the ISBN, theoretically reminding bookstores that this isn’t for sale, but to me, a bar code is still a visual cue that the book is salable.

The Espresso Book Machine allows me to print one at a time, if I want, to pick my books up locally, avoiding shipping charges, and tweak a few times, which satisfies my perfectionist nature. I recommend this method of getting ARCs out for any publisher or indie author. It’s a great way to have total control over the process and to be able to fix tiny little things.

I’ll be sending more ARC packages out this week, and at some point I’ll do a giveaway here, reveal the cover, and tell you about the process of coming up with the back cover description for A Simplified Map of the Real World. I’ve been working on this launch every day for months, and it’s so exciting to have a book now. A real book, bound and ready for others to read. A book I love by a wonderful debut author with fine-art illustrations by an amazing Seattle artist. I started Forest Avenue Press because I love editing, but I can’t wait to have finished copies in my hand and say, “Here, you have to read this book.”