Since April is National Poetry Month, I’ve been looking around at what different poets have to say about getting started. This quote by Mark Doty – from an address he gave at the 2011 Whiting Awards ceremony (the entire text of which you can read on Critical Mass) heartened me, as does each suggestion I find that amazing writers struggle as surely as we all do, and that our writing is better for it:

If there were not moments when it seems no one is paying the least bit of attention to what you do, or days when it seems the world absolutely does not need another lyric poem, another novel of ideas, I suspect our work would be far the less for it. Rejection must be at least as much a part of of our education as affirmation is; here in the vale of soul-making, it seems very unlikely that we’ll experience one without the other.

I’m in Paris, reading a poem in French today. I hope the day finds you reading poetry as well. – Meg

When Susan Straight guest-posted on 1st Books in October of 2010, I’d never met her, and hadn’t had time to read her latest novel, Take One Candle Light a Room. Since then, I’ve read this stunning book and shared the stage with Susan, Mona Simpson, Ann Cherian, and Aimee Bender at the Women and Words event in Los Angeles. And now I have the pleasure of sharing Susan’s post again to celebrate the paperback release of Take One Candle Light a Room. Susan was a National Book Award finalist for Highwire Moon, and has been called “One of America’s gutsiest writers” (The Baltimore Sun), and “a lyrical and intelligent storyteller, [who] burns clean the forbidding barriers of culture and race that blind people to one another” (People). Enjoy! – Meg

It was a revelation to me when Fantine Antoine, the protagonist of my new novel Take One Candle Light a Room, said to her best friend:  There are two kinds of people – those who stay and those who leave.  Fantine’s left home to be a travel writer, to hang out almost exclusively with people who have also left wherever they were born and remade themselves into citizens of nowhere in particular but the world.

I stayed.  Sometimes I can’t believe it, that I’ve lived all these years in the same place where I was born, and that I have been writing about this place for more than twenty years.  It’s not Los Angeles, it’s not San Diego, it’s Riverside, inland southern California, land of tumbleweeds and orange groves and people who I always knew had fascinating lives though I’d never read about them in novels.

When I was nineteen, working on my first book without even knowing it, writing in the same black notebook that Harriet the Spy used to carry, listening to people talk and laugh and tell stories, I never thought anyone but me would read those pages.  In a college class, I read an astonishing essay by Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” about failed women and men and murder in a place familiar to me – lemon groves and beauty parlors.  When I described it to my mother, she said casually, “Oh, the woman who killed her husband?  She lived across the street from your Aunt Beverly.”

But I never read novels about a place like mine.  I worked on my first book, a novel in stories called Aquaboogie, that summer, and then when I got married at 22, I worked on it even during my second night of our honeymoon outside Tijuana.  (I’d known my husband since junior high – we loved each other passionately, but he fell asleep early, and I couldn’t sleep, so I headed out to the balcony with the notebook.)  I went to graduate school, still working on the stories, while he worked nights at a juvenile corrections facility.  Then we came back home to California, to an apartment within sight of the hospital where I was born and he was born, and where our daughters were born, too.  I wrote in a closet, on a trunk his grandmother brought when she left Mississippi.  I wrote in the ancient Fiat he was always fixing, about the orange groves, the forest fires, people who fished in the local lake. Even then, I knew that like Ernest J. Gaines and Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor, I was writing about my home in a way no one else would or could.

But I can’t believe sometimes that I walk the dog out my front door, down the street past that hospital, and then past the city college where I wrote my very first short story as a sixteen-year-old in a summer class my mother made me take because my best friends were busy selling drugs and getting in trouble.

I teach at University of California, Riverside, in a room where the window faces the foothills where my brothers and I hiked nearly every day when we were children.  Sometimes, I shiver violently while my students are working with their heads down, and I see the boulders sprinkled like toasted sugar on the brown slopes, and the groves where we played, crunching the dead fruit from last year like hollow black ornaments.

Twenty years have passed since I published my first book, and I realize that some of the characters in Take One Candle Light a Room are people I wrote about way back then.  A woman from Oaxaca, standing in an alley with washwater, shocked at finding a dead body, a woman who I left in a previous novel picking strawberries in a migrant worker camp; a woman who ran a boarding house in the 1950s in a black neighborhood, who took in girls from a Louisiana plantation who were in danger of being raped by a predator; and a high school history teacher who was a hero in a previous book, trying to save his nephew.

That teacher is Fantine’s lost love, the LA travel writer who has enjoyed the severance of ties with Rio Seco and the isolated orange groves where she was raised by her father, near the Santa Ana River, a place where her nephew learned to shoot when her brothers lit the fronds on fire so that rats would leap out of the palm trees.  She doesn’t want to step in when a gang confrontation causes her nephew to flee LA for Louisiana.  She doesn’t want to see everyone who stayed, because they give her a hard time about how she’s the one who left.  But she figures out eventually that she loves Victor, her orphaned godson, whose mother Glorette was killed in that alley where the woman from Oaxaca stands with the washwater.

During the years I wrote about Fantine – a woman unmarried, childless, unencumbered by anything but her own desires, planning trips to Naples and Belize, writing for Vogue and Travel & Leisure – I was walking the same sidewalks, with daughters and dogs, as I always had.  One day, walking alone, feeling that I’d never gotten anywhere, I went home and looked at pictures of Eudora Welty at her desk in the house where she’d grown up; pictures of Ernest J. Gaines in front of his house in Louisiana, which he’d built close to the cemetery where his ancestors were buried on the plantation where he was born; photos from Smithsonian about Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote about her childhood home in upstate New York with great eloquence and deep love. And I knew how grateful I was to have such a place as this, and to see every day people who tell me stories no one else could know, even as they bring me oranges from their backyard groves and we look at the baby tumbleweeds like green explosions in the vacant lots nearby, a strange beauty in their softness, months before they turn gold. – Susan

How friendly are you, really? Do you have enough followers to qualify as a cult? Are you still blogging, or have you bought into the headlines announcing blogging is dead? Do you tweet?

Let’s pause for a minute to imagine those questions being asked of Hemingway or Austen. Dickens … well, maybe Dickens.

My third novel, The Four Ms. Bradwells, makes its way into a considerably different world than The Language of Light did nine years ago, or even than The Wednesday Sisters or the blog I started in 2008. When I asked the publisher of my first novel what I could do to help spread the word, the answer was “we’re doing everything that needs to be done”—which involved a few bookstore readings and a lot of postage stamps and long-distance phone calls. They did allow that if I sent them a list of addresses—snail mail ones—they would send out postcards announcing the book to my real-life friends.

Now the question about online marketing for authors isn’t “if” but “where.” And it’s doubly true for bloggers, where online is the entire game.

The obvious answers are your author website, your blog, Facebook and Twitter, perhaps Tumblr and Scribd. But here are ten others you might consider participating in, and why.

1. Goodreads and 
2. Library Thing for book writers.
These are two of the most popular online forums for readers. Many publishers will do book giveaways on these sites to stir up early enthusiasm; ask your publisher, or consider adding giveaway books yourself. You can also host author chats. (One drawback: With so many authors on-site, it can be a challenge to get readers to come to your particular party.)

For bloggers, the folks on these forums are readers, and most of us who read do so online as well. But some other places to spread the news about your blog include BlogHer and Networked Blogs.

3. Amazon Author Central
Set up an author profile on Amazon, and you can stream your blog to Amazon, and—this is perhaps the main reason to do it—gain access to weekly Bookscan numbers, along with geographical sales data. Trying to decide whether to set up a Milwaukee reading while you’re in town to visit your Aunt Margaret? You can see how many readers you have there who might be interested in your next book.

You also get an easy way to register the mistakes Amazon makes—and like everyone, they do occasionally make mistakes. When The Four Ms. Bradwells page went up, the author line for the hardcover read “Karen White, reader.” It wasn’t even Karen White the actor, who is reading the audio version. And last I heard, readers still have to read hardcovers themselves.

4. Redroom
This online site comes with a number of perks for authors, including a separate listing of author blogs. The folks who run it reach out beyond its own font, too, to help authors place work on Aol News. You can sell books there as well, and anyone can post a blog.

5. The Writer’s Digest community
6. SheWrites

And anywhere else writers connect. Most writers are also readers (one would hope!). And they tend to be supportive forums.

I’ve certainly read books for authors I’ve met on these kinds of sites with a eye to providing blurbs for book jackets, and received invitations to join group marketing efforts. They’re also good for sharing knowledge about writing and publishing, and making writing friends.

Whenever I’m on book tour, I’m share in-person after-reading time with writer-pals I’ve met on these forums rather than returning to empty hotel rooms. And I’ve discovered some terrific books to read, too.

7. InLinkz or any of the other many sites now that allow you to set up lists where people can add their own linkz on your site. It’s a great tool for hosting a blog hop, or letting your writer-pal link from your site.

And while you’re add it, why not host a fellow writer or blogger on your blog, or tweet along their good news. Being nice to other writers not only feels good, it generally comes back around to others helping spread your own good news.

8. Your Local Bricks and Mortar Book Store. They often have blogs, and many love to host local writers. Plus, it’s such fun to get to know booksellers, who are among the best people in the world.

9. Vistaprint or any of the other sites through which you can order cards. Aren’t you more likely to take a look at a book or a blog written by someone you’ve met? Make it easy for folks with whom you’ve crossed paths to find you.

And last but not least:

10. Wherever your own target market hangs out
Your own mileage may vary on this one. Where do readers who might like your book in particular hang out online? If you’ve written about, say, a woman runner, you might try the Women’s Running forum at RunnersWorld.com. It may take some thought and some sleuthing around. Or you may already participate in these forums.

Which brings me to the most important point about online outreach. Consider this: If you look through your front door peephole and see someone obviously wanting to sell you something, does that make you more or less likely to open the door?

If you post jumbo-sized copies of your book jacket in places that rightfully belong to others—their walls on chat sites, their Facebook pages, their blogs—folks might then recognize your cover in stores. But they will also likely think “that’s the obnoxious author who is spamming my space,” even if it isn’t on MySpace. If they pick up your book, it will likely be only to stick it in the back of the frozen fruit case. If your every post says, “Buy my book,” your novel is more likely to end up in the technical books section than in the check-out line.

Be yourself. Be nice. Be a friend to the people you friend.

Don’t spam people, just interact.

If you’re an interesting, interested person online, folks you cross paths with will take a look at your page on whatever site you’re on, and click over to your website or blog—places where your book jacket belongs. They’ll recognize it in bookstores and think, that’s that nice author I’ve met online. And in the process, you might also find that you make some meaningful friendships, and broaden your own horizons, reading and otherwise.

Happy Writing!

Meg

I met Carolina De Robertis at a book club mixer at Books Inc. Berkeley when her first novel, the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain was just out. She had a newborn baby and a newborn book, but you’d have thought she was an old hand at parenthood and at book promotion from the grace with which she handled both at the same time. Her second novel, Perla, is a coming-of-age story based on a recent shocking chapter of Argentine history, about a young woman who makes a devastating discovery about her origins with the help of an enigmatic houseguest.  It just released yesterday, and it is getting stars from everyone who gives them, as near as I can tell, and rave reviews. O Magazine calls it  “mesmerizing … moving, poetic.” I’ve begun reading it myself, and I couldn’t agree more. Maybe you’ll stick around long enough to read her post, or maybe you’re already on your way to your favorite store? – Meg

My second novel is now officially in the world, and this makes me grateful on many levels. Among them: I managed to avoid Second Novel Syndrome.

I’m referring to the condition in which a writer completes her or his first novel, gets it published, and then finds herself running on empty with the second. There are no more ideas. Or the story doesn’t gel. Paragraphs fail to sustain the crushing weight of expectations. He flounders. She is frozen. It appears that there is nothing left to say. Years go by and, in the worst version of this malady, no novel is ever finished again.

When I was working on my first novel, I’d heard of this syndrome, and yes, it scared me, but I was more concerned with more immediate forms of doubt: I couldn’t pull off an big, ambitious, multi-generational novel. It was too ambitious. I’d never finish. Even if I did finish, nobody would ever want to publish or read a book about far-flung little Uruguay, let alone one that included queer women and armed revolutionaries among its characters. And who did I think I was to write in the first place?

Fortunately for me, my obsession was stronger than my fears. It wasn’t exactly that I had faith in myself, but more that I burned with an urgent need to get these stories—inspired my own family history, as well as research into my country of origin—onto the page, to do justice to the vision that had caught hold of me. I was in my mid-twenties, working for peanuts at a rape crisis center, locking myself up in my tiny apartment on the weekends to write and write. It was hard work, and I missed many parties, protests, and sunny California days. But I’d been a passionate reader all my life, and I couldn’t think of any better way to spend my “spare” time than striving to give back a small drop to the great ocean of literature that had made me who I am.

After five years, in 2005, I sent the novel out to agents. I really thought I was done, though now, when I think back on the manuscript, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry from embarrassment. Luckily, one agent called and told me two important things: 1) she thought the book still needed substantial work, and 2) she loved its potential and wanted to sign me on immediately.

This gave me the most incredible surge of encouragement, coupled with a huge kick in the pants. I signed the contract, re-opened the novel, and began an MFA program that blew my world open with new craft tools, aesthetic possibilities, and intrepid mentors and peers. I worked my tail off on the book. A year later, in 2006, I sent it back to my agent, full of hope.

She wrote back a long, detailed, and brutally honest editorial letter. Among other things, she pointed out (and rightly so) that the present-day character, a young woman born in the turbulent 1970s, didn’t fit into the book. The narrative really belonged to the prior three generations. Which meant that the last sixty pages and entire arc of the ending were not working. And I wasn’t even close to done.

Looking back now, I see my agent as a hero for sticking by the book on its winding road. And, looking back, I also see what a mad proposition it was to attempt a sprawling epic as my first novel, and how reasonable it is, really, to learn as you go, and to take many years and drafts to pull it off.

But at the time, I was devastated. After six years, my manuscript still wouldn’t hold together. I’d failed. I’d wasted my time. I felt about two inches tall. I spent that summer fantasizing about fleeing the Bay Area for Botswana, or any other far-flung place where nobody would ever know that I had once dared call myself a writer.

But here’s what happened instead:

I committed to the revision. But I also took a break. I was fatigued by this behemoth of a project, and I wanted to taste the fresh air of something new. I started to explore ideas for a second novel. And I found them right under my nose, among the discarded pieces of my first book. I’d had to cut out the story of a young woman born in the 1970s, in the thick of a dictatorship, who later has to peel open the secrets of her origins in order to truly come of age. It had been painful to lop off these chapters, and I wouldn’t reuse any of the actual plot or prose, but the themes themselves didn’t have to be discarded. They could fertilize new ground, and, like compost, be used to grow something new.

I started to research the Argentinean dictatorship, and the 30,000 disappearances that took place under it. I learned about the 500 pregnant women who disappeared, gave birth in captivity, and were killed while their babies were secretly given away to families that often had colluded with the atrocities. I thought about the perpetrators, how that was a side of the story I hadn’t told in my first book, and about which I had so many questions. What about their complicated, marred humanity? Their inner lives? Their families? I began to imagine. And sketch. And dream.

By the time the rights to The Invisible Mountain sold, the book that is now Perla was well underway. Perhaps, if it hadn’t been, the noise and thrill and vulnerability of publication might have paralyzed me, and made it feel impossible to start something new. But I’d already started something new, and it had a life of its own. I didn’t know everything about it yet, but I knew it had momentum, too much of it for me to turn back.

I am now an utter believer in overlapping projects. Before I finished editing Perla, I embarked on my third novel. I plan to continue this way until forces of nature make me stop.

These days, I trust that inspiration is infinite. And that the writing we throw away—messy free-writes, wonky chapters, flat prose, extraneous characters—is never wasted. It is all compost. It all nourishes the creative soil from which our stories cannot help but spring, if we are only patient and obsessed enough to till that soil, over and over, no matter what. – Carolina

M.J. Rose - whom I’ve known since before my first novel was published – is one of the gutsiest and most generous writers I know. Needless to say, I’m thrilled to be hosting this international bestseller, and even more thrilled with the amazing attention her new novel, The Book of Lost Fragrances, is getting. It’s an IndieNext Pick, the Starbuck’s Bookclub pick this week, and a Pulpwood Queens summer pick. Publisher’s Weekly not only gave it a starred, boxed review, but also named it a top 10 mystery/thriller of the Spring, calling it ”deliciously sensual” with “a complex plot that races to a satisfying finish.” M.J.’s path to publication could be described in the same way. (Well, I’m not sure about the sensual part. But complex, yes. Satisfying finish, for sure – although it’s clearly not over yet!). – Meg

It was 1998. And 1998 was the dark ages.

I had an agent and two finished and unsold novels. Publishers had been really excited about them but ultimately too uncomfortable with my genre-bending writing to bite. They wanted me to write either a suspense novel or an erotic novel, or a mystery… or something less sophisticated… or more sophisticated.

Not a little of this and a little of that.

They said there was no way to market a book that was so hard to categorize.

But I was in advertising and didn’t understand the words never or no or can’t when it came to marketing.

I’d gone on line in 1994 and been fascinated with the marketing opportunities I imagined possible. So what if I did an online marketing test for my novel- get some sales and then my agent could take my plan and approach to one of those publishers and show they how to market my work.

I figured could print up a few copies and offer an electronic download on line.

The only place to sell the electronic book was from my own website. And the only place to direct sales of the print book was to Amazon – they’d just started the Advantage program for anyone with a book, an ISBN, and a dream.

I didn’t think I was doing anything terrible. It was a marketing experiment. But my agent said I was self-publishing and that it would end of my career before it began. She was very unhappy with me and we split over my decision.

My friends thought I was nuts and said people would think I was self-publishing because I was a failure and that no one would ever take me seriously.

That seemed absurd. I had so many friends who were painters, photographers, sculptors and artists and Indy filmmakers – individuals all who operated creatively and on their own. I didn’t see what I was doing as being very different.

So I printed up the books and set up the website with the electronic books and started the different marketing efforts. They were going pretty well and I was getting excited. That winter, I took a copy of the novel to my local bookstore and told her what was happening online and asked the owner if she’d look at it and take a few copies.

She wouldn’t even turn around and face me – “I don’t look at self-published books,” she’d said with utter derision.

I stood in the snow outside that bookstore and burst into tears. And out of those tears came determination. I became tireless in marketing the book and it really started selling. Within the first six months I sold almost 3000 copies.

Six months, after I’d started my online marketing test Lip Service went on to become the first self-published book and the first ebook discovered online (at Amazon) to go on to be traditionally published.

The publishing world could not be more different today. In a lot of ways it’s very gratifying. The world many of us – Douglas Clegg, Seth Godin, Doug Ruskoff and others – envisioned, is here.

Recently J.K. Rowling, one of the richest writers in the world announced she was self-publishing. Times sure have changed since I stood outside that bookstore in the snow.

In many ways it has never been more difficult to make a living as writer as it is today and in other ways it’s never been more exciting. The rules have all been bent or broken and the future is wide open to anyone with a good idea and time and energy to devote. – M.J.

San Francisco author Meg Donohue has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and a first novel out this week. Kirkus reviews says of How to Eat a Cupcake, ”A little friendship, a little wit and a little mystery make for a charming debut.” Her path to publication is an unusual one, that also involves a friendship. – Meg

Eighteen months ago, I signed a contract with HarperCollins for my first novel, How to Eat a Cupcake. As I touched my pen to the paper, I felt an enormous wave of equal parts elation and terror wash over me. Elation, because being a published novelist was a longtime dream and this contract meant it was going to come true. Terror, because I had not yet actually written the book.

I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember, published stories in a few literary journals over the years, and attended an MFA program during which I wrote (and promptly discarded) a novel—but I had spent the three years leading up to signing that contract cobbling together a living as a freelance journalist, blogger, and professional resume writer. I was, foremost, a stay-at-home mom to our baby daughter. I wrote snippets of fiction whenever I could, but it was a time in my life when I prioritized motherhood and paychecks over my passion for writing stories. Though I wasn’t writing fiction as much as I would have liked during those years, I never stopped reading like a writer, a skill I had honed in graduate school. Even if I wasn’t writing much fiction, I was studying the novels that I read, dissecting them to see how the characters were brought to life, where the stories turned and quickened and slowed to create plot arcs, and how the authors had managed to infuse tension into their pages.

Then came the conversation with my friend and Harper editor extraordinaire, Jeanette Perez, in which we discussed how fun it would be to set a novel in the world of cupcakes. My wheels began to spin. I wanted to write a story of friendship and food—a story about two very different, but equally strong women who had a falling out as teens and were brought back together by their ambition, their shared love of baked goods, and a web of childhood secrets. I wrote a short synopsis, then a ten-page outline, and then the first two chapters of the novel. I sent them to Jeanette and after several weeks of quiet during which time seemed to slow to a snail’s pace, I learned that Harper wanted to offer me a contract to write the rest of the book. Elation! And then: Terror.

Was I going to be able to deliver what I had promised? I’d only written two chapters; what if the novel fell apart as I continued? Jeanette and the publishing house had shown such faith in me. What if I let them down? These were the worries that kept me up into the early hours of the morning after signing The Contract (it took on a life of its own at times, requiring capitalization).

But the next day I sat down at my desk and started writing the third chapter of How to Eat a Cupcake. The thing that got me through that first day, and many of the days that followed, was the outline I had written back when I was filled with more hope than self-doubt. The person who had written that outline was in control of the story. She was confident about the pace of the plot and the voices of the characters. That person, of course, was me, but I felt grateful for the guideposts the earlier, more confident version of me had created before the The Contract came into my life.

I’d never written with a detailed outline before, and I’ll never write without one again. On the bad days, it brought me comfort to know that even if the writing wasn’t flowing, I knew where my story was headed; I knew what my characters were going to do and how they would grow. A few plot points changed over the course of writing the book—the characters occasionally led me places I had not anticipated going—but that outline served me in good stead. It was a dependable road map during even the darkest hours of the writing process.

I have another map now: an outline for a new novel entitled “All the Summer Girls,” also under contract. A solid outline, a little inspiration, and a lot of discipline keep the terror at bay, allowing the light of elation more room to glow. – Meg