Effective Self-Presentation for Novelists' Publicity

Have you ever seen yourself present something on camera?

I was videotaped teaching college students as part of my training in grad school. Wow, was that an eye-opener. Presenting an analytical subject is not as easy as it feels. Though I was satisfied with my performance overall, I was surprised to see that a few of my points during the lesson might have been an analytical leap for my students, who didn't have my background knowledge to help them connect the dots.

I will never forget what I learned by watching myself on video. What we think we are presenting is not necessarily what comes out to the listener or viewer. To know how we will appear in interviews, we have to look at ourselves from the outside.

In this post, I'm going to showcase three kinds of interview: telephone-to-print, public TV interview, and self-or-publisher-created video interview.

I did my first telephone interview for a newspaper article a couple of months ago, for a publication called This Week Westerville. Thanks to a nice job by the reporter, it came out well. Here it is if you want to check it out.

One aspect of print interviews to remember is that you will not always be quoted in your own exact words, especially if the reporter is taking notes rather than recording you. That difference in phrasing can be surprising to writers who are accustomed to their own speech patterns. But this reporter did what good reporters do: she captured the spirit and the content of what I had said.

Radio and TV are a whole different ballgame. Few of us like to listen to ourselves or watch ourselves on screen. But it's a necessary part of promotion, especially if your novel has a nonfiction component that will appeal to a certain demographic and encourage them to take interest. In my case, my novel is based on a real family who lived in Westerville, Ohio in the nineteenth century and worked on the Underground Railroad. So it's possible that for radio and TV in Central Ohio, I might be asked to speak in detail about this family and my research. For interviews in other regions, I might be asked about the Underground Railroad. I could do either of these topics, though I admit I would do some serious preparation before an interview focused more generally on the Underground Railroad! I might even be interviewed on the more personal subject of "Humanities Ph.D.s who work outside of academia, and how they use their training."

Author Robin Caroll did several interviews for her novels that are available on YouTube, so I hope she won't mind being an example to show a couple of types of interview that an author may encounter.

Here is a small television station interview with Robin about her novel.

Here's an interview that Robin's publisher put together to showcase her work. Notice how in both interviews, she explains the link between her novel and the nonfiction issue that inspired it: child trafficking. Then she discusses her novel In the Shadow of Evil, which has a connection to gang violence and to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Robin communicates herself as a wonderfully warm, down-to-earth person who would be easy for readers to like. That is her strength, that is who she is, and so her publisher has done a good job of helping readers connect with the real Robin.

Here's the same type of publisher-created promotion, but created for Tosca Lee, an author who appeals in a completely different way. Tosca's style is very dramatic, and so her interview is just as good, but she does not bring as much personal material into it (despite the fact that the segment is called "Author Spotlight"). Her focus is resolutely on the book, and she does it very well. This is Tosca's strength as an interviewee--drama and mystery. Is she much more than that, just as Robin is more than the brief glimpse of her personality that comes across in her interviews? Absolutely! But the clarity required by publicity means that each of these authors must focus on her core appeal in order to best connect with readers in the limited time available.

Effective self-presentation means first knowing yourself, and then having others to help you identify your areas of strength. My publicity team will tape me in a mock interview before I do real ones. This will help me hone my answers so I don't stutter or stop making sense during the real thing.

I do like the points that commenters made in my last post, though, about answers that sound rehearsed. Ideally, we want to know the general shape of our answers without plotting them out word by word. That will preserve our freshness without risking our coherence.

What do you think would be your personality strengths for radio or TV interviews? Are you the comfortable, cup-of-coffee kind of friend who radiates warmth? Are you funny? Or do you have an edge of mystery in your voice that intrigues? Don't be shy...let's identify what qualities help authors connect with specific readers! Or, tell us about a memorable author interview you saw or heard, and why you connected with that author.

Into Publicity's Brave New World

On Friday, I had my first conference call with Thomas Nelson Publicity.

I enjoyed it, because like everyone I've met at Thomas Nelson, the publicity team is very congenial and welcoming.

However, our discussion did prompt some thoughts for me about the stark difference between publicity and novel-writing.

At one point, a team member told me that I needed to think about how I would answer a certain question. She said I will be asked this question repeatedly in interviews: "Why did you become a novelist after getting a Ph.D. in English?"

Now, I'm pretty much an open book when it comes to my life and its whys and hows. I've actually already answered this particular question in several online interviews like this one with Roxane Salonen.

So what's the big deal?

Even when I answered this question for Roxane, in a written interview, I wasn't able to answer it completely. I also blogged about my career choice myself, and I had to table some aspects of the discussion as "too complex to explain here."

Let's face it: major decisions like career choices involve every aspect of our personalities, our gifts, and our life stories.

The story of a career choice is a novel, not an interview.

Yet the fact remains that my publicity teammate is absolutely right. I am going to be asked that question, and I need to come up with a concise way to answer it.

Novels are about complexity.

Publicity is about simplicity and clarity.

This essential difference is why publicity can feel so strange to novelists. In our novels, we aim to draw out complexity, to show rather than tell, to let events tell their own stories to readers. But publicity is all about telling, about simplifying ourselves and our novels to soundbites that can be understood in ten minute radio or TV interviews. This is not a negative thing, it's just the reality of how one must learn to transmit information through different media.

I have a good idea about how I'm going to answer questions about my career choice, now, but I need to write it down and rehearse it until it's crystal clear.

More on that next week, in Effective Self-Presentation for Publicity!

Questions for you: Do you think publicity would be easy for you or challenging? How do you feel about sharing aspects of your personal life in interviews? Are you more comfortable with print interviews than radio or TV?

Writing Your Passion in Genre

What happens if you specialize in one genre, and it's not hip right now? How about if you publish in one genre and do pretty well for a while, but then the genre slides into unpopularity and your sales drop?

Some authors choose to switch genres.

This may or may not be a good move.

Some authors are capable of writing in more than one genre, like Stephen King. His mainstream short stories are quite different from his horror writing. (Think of The Shawshank Redemption versus The Shining. Each is a classic in its own way.)

Other writers may not be capable of such agility. And some genres require more learning time than others for a writer to become adept. Historicals require a facility and ease with historical detail that cannot be acquired overnight, which is why historical writers usually specialize in that kind of work. Mysteries must be so well-designed that they leave me in awe, and fluency with that kind of design doesn't happen for beginners.

To write really good contemporaries, a writer has to have an interest in the general issues and problems that drive our lives right now--the spirit of our time. I am not drawn to many of those contemporary issues, at least, not as a writer. I am very unlikely to ever write a contemporary novel with major characters who are celebrities or pro athletes, or teenagers in rebellion. It's just not my game, as Doc Holliday might say. Yet other writers do this very well, and I can enjoy their gifts when I read their work.

Longtime writers of contemporaries would know me as an imposter in a second if I decided to write in their genre tomorrow. :-) Why? Because I don't have the natural sense of contemporary pacing, the eye for what small details are important in contemporary life. My brain has been wired by preference and by training for historicals. Any contemporary I tried to write would be clunky. Even if I could get good at it with hard work, I think it would take me at least two or three novels to improve. And that is a genre for which I would be inundated with material, all the time, from my own contemporary life! Imagine how much harder it would be for an inexperienced writer to "come up to speed" in military thrillers, or hard science fiction, or any genre which requires in-depth research or years of previously acquired knowledge. Anyone can research, but learning how to use that research in a given genre takes practice.

Sometimes, a writer starts off in one genre and then discovers she is much more comfortable in another. That's the opposite of switching from a natural genre for you to an unnatural one.

It's also not too much of a stretch for an author to write both adult fiction and young adult fiction in the same genre. The conventions and feel of the genre don't change from one age group to the other. Usually young adult fiction just has younger characters and is less likely to have controversial content in "romance" or violence.

What do you think about writing in multiple genres? Have you tried it? Did you find you were good at more than one, or did you have a strong gift for one over the other? Have you seen famous authors try to switch genres and succeed?

Why I Left the Amish, by Saloma Furlong

If you're a longtime reader of my blog, you know I don't review fiction. Every now and then, I will recommend an excellent nonfiction book or historical resource for writers.

This week, I want to tell you about a disturbing and unforgettable memoir: Saloma Furlong's Why I Left the Amish.

The most popular genre in inspirational fiction right now is Amish fiction. In these romantic novels, the Amish community is often idealized as a more communal, slower-paced alternative to the hectic rush of twenty-first century America.

I have no doubt that the Amish community has its virtues. But if we are going to read about its positive attributes, I think it's only intellectually honest and ethical to be willing to understand its drawbacks as well.

In an old-world, intensely patriarchal culture like that of the Amish, women don't have much of a public voice. If they are under the protection of a virtuous Amish gentleman, everything may be fine. The question is, what happens to Amish women who have severe dysfunction in their families and no social power to protect themselves when men around them behave in despicable ways? And how common is that situation for Amish families?

Saloma Furlong's memoir is a finely-written, harrowing study of the circumstances that brought her to leave everything she knew and set out for parts unknown with a suitcase in hand. I hope you will click on her name to go check out her blog and read her excellent work. For those of us who love America's past, or communities like the Amish that seem to capture the values of the past, it's vital to remember that a hundred years of progress has brought women protection in very basic ways that we may now take for granted.

I'm grateful for organizations that help abused women start over, and for laws that hold abusive men accountable.

How about you? Are you grateful for a contemporary freedom or protection for women and/or children that we did not possess in 1875? Do you think we have a responsibility to know real history or the real story of a culture, with its beauties AND its flaws? Or is it OK to leave out the flaws?