Episode 2: Ryan Van Cleave, Nonfiction Writer and Writing Teacher
A podcast all about nonfiction book proposals, nonfiction article pitching, and strategically growing your writing career, including a ton of tips for that ever-intimidating concept of marketing yourself and your writing.
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Transcript of Podcast episoDe 2: Interview with Ryan Van Cleave, Nonfiction Writer and Writing Teacher
Mary: Hello. This is Mary Kole, and "The Good Story Podcast," helping writers craft a good story. With me, you will hear from thought leaders related to writing, and sometimes not, about topics important to writers of all categories and ability levels. Here is to telling a good story. Thank you so much for joining us. This is Mary Kole, of Good Story Company, and I have with me, Ryan Van Cleave, who is an expert in the art of the nonfiction book proposal, writing on proposal, nonfiction books in general. His excellent book is "The Weekend Book Proposal," which I highly, highly recommend for writers who are in the nonfiction space or looking to get into the nonfiction space, which I'm sure we'll talk about. Ryan, is there anything else to know about Ryan Van Cleave?
Ryan: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me here today. I'm primarily these days, do my main work as being the Head of the Writing Program at Ringling College of Art Design, and one of the things we really do there is we have a professional focus. So my first class I teach them is Introduction to Profession of Creative Writing. So I talk about these very things and how to monetize ideas all the time.
Mary: That is wonderful, and I'm sure it will come into play in our conversation. So, I'm gonna just dive right in. One of the things you said, and one of the points that you make in your book is this idea of monetizing ideas. Now, sometimes writers have this divide in their minds between art and business, right? One feels wonderful, creative, you know, life-affirming. The other feels, oh, maybe kind of sleazy or there's maybe a negative connotation to marketing yourself, monetizing your art. In your book, you make this point that writing on proposal and creating a nonfiction book proposal for your idea rather than say pouring three years of your life into a complete manuscript, that's sometimes is a very good way of exploring your ideas and getting a taste of the marketplace and getting a sense of demand for your idea without going all-in, and that might be a really cool way for writers to write who maybe haven't thought of doing that with their time and with their sort of project planning before.
Ryan: The book you're talking about there, one of the things I did was I included words of wisdom by lots of people who had some terrific ideas they said as well or better than I could. And Tim Ferriss echoes that exact same point that you're making here, where he talked about how putting together his own book proposals was a lot like critically examining his own thought process and helping organize his ideas. He even went so far as to say that he thought was a useful process. Even if the ultimate book never got published, he still thought there is a lot of value in it. And I do find that one of the biggest mistakes that young writers make or early-career writers is they get lost in the excitement about an idea without thinking enough about audience viability. And the sooner you try to put it into a sales document, which is really what a book proposal is, the sooner you get a sense about how big that audience is. And that's not to say that a small audience isn't worth it. You know, the same reason that writing a memoir, for instance. Even if it's only for your family or, you know, 100 friends or something, there's still a value in that, but you should come into it knowing fully well what the reasonable expectations are and how you're gonna shape the project itself towards the goals and the ideas and the preconceptions and the needs of your specific audience, because if you don't have that sense of clarity, the odds of you hitting that mark well is quite unlikely, in which case, you might have a product that doesn't quite fit what you want, and it doesn't suit your needs either.
Mary: So this is gonna be a radical way of talking about a project for a lot of writers. A lot of writers...I keep coming back to that Terry Pratchett quote that the first draft is the writer telling the story to themselves, right? But this takes a lot of time, and maybe the writer isn't necessarily thinking about their readers when they get a first draft down on paper. So a lot of writers don't really come into the process, at least in my experience, thinking about audience, thinking about market, thinking about all of these sort of external determining factors for their project.
Ryan: So, yes, you're totally right. I run across this all the time. I think there's a pervasive, I'll call it a misconception out there that's perpetrated by teachers and a lot of other writers for various reasons, that commerce or, you know, the idea of making money is a dirty concept. You're exactly right about that. The reality is, is that my hope is that people can be more efficient in their process. I think that people who truly love writing should find a situation in which they can do what they love more. Right? I like what I do, and the way that I'm able to continue to do it versus something I don't like doing is by, you know, doing it well and thinking about the end goal and how it's going to be monetized. That's not saying I'm going to the lowest common denominator and, you know, the idea of selling out, you know, making air quotes around selling out there. If you can put your personal stamp on the product, whatever the product is, if you can say it is at or above what I think is, you know, good quality, something I can endorse and feel good about, that's really the key. It's when you get below that line, that's when you're pandering, that's when you're selling out, and that's where you're making terrible mistakes. So it doesn't matter whether you're writing children's books or a memoir or a business book or some kind of how-to, self-help, new agey book, it doesn't matter if it's something you're passionate about, something you wanna do, and it's something you think others will find valuable, and you do it in a way that makes you proud of the work itself, and you enjoy it along the way. That's the goal. If you can do that for a living and not have to like, you know, dig ditches, or be a janitor, or for a lot of writers, teach, then by God, you shouldn't do those things. Hopefully, some of the ideas that I've talked about in my book and, you know, listening to people like you at Good Story Company and the good ideas about how to, you know, create great products here, that's gonna free them to do the things they love. And gotta tell you, the secret there's that suddenly not work anymore. That's the dream.
Mary: Yes. I dream about 60 hours a week. You're totally right. There's this idea of, you know, my punk rock artist self absolutely hears it, but people hold out for, you know, "I need to write this perfect novel, this perfect memoir, this perfect book, whatever it is, and I need to hold it up to the marketplace, and maybe people will find it. But it doesn't matter because it's gonna be such a work of genius." I really like your approach because I happen to be a fan of working smarter, not harder. I have an anecdote. A writer that I was recently talking to, multi-multi published, was in a position where they wanted to maybe move publishers, and the way into the new publisher happened to be a work-for-hire project. And for a hot second, this writer had this knee-jerk reaction like, "Oh, you know, I create my own art. Why would I do a work-for-hire project?" Because, it was viewed as, you know, maybe somehow beneath the caliber of that person. But then thinking about it, right? It's a strategic move allowing this person to transition to a different desirable situation, and it is writing work. At the end of the day, it is money for writing, which is just a dream scenario for anyone. So I think your idea about being more open-minded to sort of how you approach this writing, not just for art, but also for, hopefully, work and payment for your craft, I think is just really smart and refreshing.
Ryan: Well, thanks. I completely agree, and it's exactly what we teach our students here at the same time, and we try to get them thinking about ways they can monetize their interests, their love, their passion while practicing their craft. And one of the things we talk a lot about is how you don't have to make all your money on one project. I have about nine different revenue streams. One of them is teaching. You know, one is the books. One is my blog. You know, I also do various other things too. And what you can do is when you have clarity of purpose, and you have a sense of the audience and the message that you've really got at the core of who and what you are, you can shape a lot of those things so they feed off each other. And one chunk of research might fuel four of those different avenues, and some of those might translate into real revenue streams. Maybe some might not immediately, but like any time I do a nonfiction book, you're gonna probably see me blogging about it. You'll probably see me doing some magazine work about it. I'll probably do some interviews for, you know, whether it doesn't work in that project or not, it falls into something else. I mean, like a really good example is in "The Weekend Book Proposal," in the appendices material there, I actually have interviews I did with various industry professionals. I actually did more than those that are in there. And what did I do with them? Well, they didn't make it in the book for various reasons, largely just, you know, word count and length. So I repurposed them into articles and other things elsewhere. So you never quite know where anything fits. You know, you do the work, you gather it, you bring it all together, and it all helps you clarify your idea, create material and allows you then to maybe choosy about putting your best material forward. Too many people only create this one thing, and then that's what they've gotta go with. When in reality, if you do three times as much work, you've got a whole lot of material that you can sift through, and you can make sure that what you choose can talk to each other and interact better and ultimately represent your vision more fully.
Mary: I think that's a really good point. So I've been a freelance editor now for seven years, and one of the things that I've really...you know, coming from the very traditional publishing landscape of being a literary agent, literally being in the traditional system, is this idea that a project...you can sort of determine a project's destiny on a project-by-project basis. So many people think of the traditional publishing system and say, "Okay. I'm going to get with a house, get with an agent, publish a book every year until I keel over at my typewriter." And that's the path. But usually, a lot of writers, they have multiple ideas. To your point, they have multiple things that they wanna create, multiple formats that those things can take. So, for example, your idea for a book can be your idea for a book, but you can also develop companion pieces that can be great blog articles, or you meet a really cool person in your field that you'd love to interview for let's say a podcast. None of that work is wasted. You're right. A lot of writers have this idea of this like the glowing manuscript itself, but those same writers are going to run into a pretty uncomfortable situation in two years when they're expected to market their work. And the publisher will really put the squeeze on them to step into that marketing role, the social media, the marketing platform role, and all of a sudden, they've been putting all of their effort into this one project. But I really like your approach of generating other ideas and kind of spinning off things into different formats.
Ryan: So, I'll give you a good example about this. I recently struck gold of one of my bucket list writing things I've always wanted to do is I wanna do a feature for "Writer's Digest." And so I finally landed one. I'm gonna have a piece in the March 2020 issue that's on the power and perils of prologues. And you know where that idea came from? It came from the classroom because a student asked me about what makes a good prologue. So I've been thinking about it in terms of my role and hat as a teacher. And then I was thinking, "Well, I have this now. What can I do with it?" So I pitched it to "Writer's Digest" and the same exact material, which is to say almost nothing more than what I've already done for class, I was able to repurpose and get paid an extremely professional rate for with a national periodical that's gonna be on every, you know, bookseller shelf and the magazine rack for a month here in the whole U.S. in March. So like that's a great example of doing double-duty. And I've also thought about doing a craft book. So, we've come to no one's surprise that I might have a whole section on prologues too, where I might yet again repurpose some of those materials or go to experts, including yourself, who is one nice enough to give me a quote for that and get even a little bit more. But building off those relationships and those understandings, I got off of all these kinds of various purpose things, but at the core is just one idea that I've found a lot of avenues to explore, utilize, and then let's get to the core here, monetize.
Mary: That is really, really good. And, you know, congratulations. I was familiar with your article because you did ask me for some thoughts on prologue, but you were open-minded enough to sort of see a need in your classroom. "Hey, if this one writer in this one class is wondering about prologues, I bet that this is, you know, a hot-button issue out there." You thought of a market that would take it, "Writers Digest" very well-known. And, you know, your professional rate aside, your potential utility of this article in a book aside, you're also gonna have a clip from a hot magazine on your resume forever, and it was a bucket list thing for you, more importantly just from a human perspective. You were able to check that box. So I think that's just an awesome example of spinning one bit of inspiration into, what, three now potential utilities for the same idea?
Ryan: Possibly more. I've got some other ideas in mind. It's that kind of, you know, creative thinking about how it all kind of connects is what really helps people, not just produce the work, but also write a compelling proposal, which at fundamental core is a sales document. One of the things that people can be working on that applies to all of their sales documents, more or less regardless of their topic, is building your platform. This is where so many early-career writers and also mid-career writers sometimes fall short when they pitch something. It's that they don't answer the question, why me, and sort of the implied question on that, which is who listens to you, right? That's what a platform is, you know, is if you had some platform up high in the sky and a bunch of people stood around and listened to you as you talk. You have to build these often virtual platforms. And I thought about this long and hard when I moved a lot of my writing career into children's books about four years ago, and one of the first things I did was really think about platform. And that caused me to launch a blog, something I've always thought about doing. I now run onlypicturebooks.com. And as a result of that blog, which I've been running for 18 months or so now, I would say 75% of all the top editors and agents in the business now are fully aware of who I am because of that blog alone. It's created a really effective platform that's part of the sales document that I created for anything that my agent and I put forward to them. And it's the exact same principle that happens with any nonfiction book proposals. You have people who are paying attention and listening to you regularly. They trust you, and if you make a recommendation or you create a product, they are much more likely than a stranger to take advantage of it and give it a shot. Just like people listening to Good Story Company here, they trust you. If you put out another book as a follow-up to your other terrific book on writing, they're probably gonna be extremely inclined as opposed to someone who's never heard of you or me. You know, you're just a stranger and they're a stranger, and those are always super dicey connections. But you're creating a ready-built audience prepared for success and building up your credentials to make a very compelling pitch on why you, why this, why now.
Mary: So, those are amazing tips for anyone to consider. Let's talk about your picture book example. So you made this pivot into children's books. Picture books, for the most part, are fiction. One of the questions that I get all the time from fiction writers is, "Well, I'm just writing a novel." So, my novel is about, let's say butterflies. There are only so many butterfly articles that I can share with people. What is my platform and how...? You know, they know the advice. Get a blog, get a website, get social media, get on Twitter, get a Facebook, but they're writing a nice little story about a girl and her butterflies. What do they blog about? How do they get themselves out there? In a way, you know, you're on the radar now for agents and editors, and I feel like that is...the goal of that is the desire, but for your average fiction writer, that seems out of reach. What do they do with this well-meaning advice of get a platform? How do they actually get started?
Ryan: That's a great question. How do you get started? My students ask me this all the time because they're all trying to start too. So, one of the things I oftentimes caution against is jumping in into the deepest of waters where you're gonna be immediately over your head. Which is to say, if you are not prepared to blog regularly, you ought not to blog right now. This is not the appropriate time for you. The same thing too. If you're scared of Twitter, or you don't understand Facebook, or you just don't have the time or energy to actually run it effectively, it's probably worse to launch one of those things and do it only half-heartedly or not at all really than to just hold off until you're ready to do it. So, just because those are the often recommended and recognized as worthwhile venues to create platform, they're not the only way. So, for instance, in your example about the kid writing about a sort of mundane topic about, you know, butterflies or, you know, any kind of just topic in which there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to spin that, we can always back it up and just think about the writing itself. How about an article from a young person's perspective about a young person trying to write a book, you know, from the revision point of view. Or possibly how about the research that they did. You know, there's lots of people interested in the process of research, even to about the different sorts of avenues that you could actually publish in. You have your community newspapers. You have other people's oftentimes very niche blogs. So you could be an interview subject or an interviewer doing a guest blog on those. So getting yourself out there, making yourself known as connected to or interested in a variety of these topics sometimes creates those opportunities just like we're doing here today. This is a great opportunity for me to reach a different audience talking about something that I'm interested in doing that I don't off the top my head here have a real article I wanna write about it. I wrote a book about it, but I probably should do more. Well, this is more. This is another way to do it. And these things only happen if you are professionally active, you're looking for opportunities, and that you say yes to most of them when they come, and then you find a way to do the best that you can with them. So that's a start.
I mean, of course, building a platform is, it's an ongoing process. It's not an end goal. You never get there and stop. Anyone short of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling and people like that, they can stop, or more likely what they do is they hire someone else to run all those things for them and they don't have to do any of it. So they're actually a terrible example to go to and ask for advice because they don't really know. The people who do this well are the people who do it well. They're easy to find. You know, you just go to these sites, websites or blogs or podcasts. Look at the ones who are, you know, sort of mid-tier, lower A list authors or people on the rise, odds are they're probably doing it themselves, and they're gonna have some really good examples of best practices just in terms of what they do. And mirroring a success, maybe not copying it exactly, but mirroring it, and following some of the advice with your own spin on it is a fantastic way to go forward versus just kind of taking a guess and hoping that this might work, which there's nothing wrong with that too. But again, like we've been talking, I think one of the real core messages we've got today is we're all really busy. And how can I be efficient with that limited amount of time that I might have? I might have a full-time job. All I got's an hour a day. I can put five days a week into writing in my career, and a lot of that I wanna work on my novel or my business book or whatever, my project. I don't have a lot of extra time for this marketing stuff. What can I do for two hours a week? That's really it. We wanna make sure those two hours or whatever they've got is used effectively with a likelihood of success that's higher than just picking stuff at random or the worst case of all just doing nothing and hoping luck wins out.
Mary: Yeah. I feel like a lot of people really don't know how to approach marketing, and my sneaking suspicion is that maybe people have, like you were saying, why don't you interview somebody, why don't you write about your research process, why don't you be an interviewee for someone else? And I think that is fantastic advice. But what might be stopping some writers, especially kind of writers in the early stages, might be this idea that, "Well, who the heck am I?" Right? "Do I have a research process?" Like, that very idea might seem preposterous to some people. Or, "Would this butterfly expert give me the time of day?" No sir, you know, and kind of...people may have trouble thinking of themselves as experts. We have to, I think, break this thought process if we are gonna market ourselves because otherwise, marketing something that you don't believe in, namely yourself, can be a really, really difficult proposition. So, if you have a writer who's really reluctant to sort of hang out their shingle, how might you advise them?
Ryan: That's a great question. And you're right. You know, writers, we're kind of schizophrenic people. You know, we're, "I'm not good enough." We often have that impulse, and it's a good impulse to have in terms of the revision aspect. But we should have confidence that what we're doing is worthwhile and not just to ourselves and others. The key's figuring out who are those people for whom this would be useful. And I guess just kind of truly address the idea about being an expert, one of the things that I think happens when we do research is that we go to experts. We don't just Google. If you're just googling, that's not even research. That's the beginning of research. So I'll give you an example. I just finished writing first draft of a novel, and part of it takes place on a Martian settlement. So, I've been contacting dudes from NASA, and people like, you know, run the SETI Institute, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. So for this project, I've been contacting people at NASA, at, you know, MIT, Caltech, some of these biggest movers or shakers in, you know, the astronomical and cosmological, exobiologist, you know, these people who are doing the most amazing things right now. And, of course, it's really helping give my book a sense of science fact versus science fiction. But it's also giving me a bunch of sense of knowledge about interesting things that then maybe I might repurpose into an article for a periodical, which then I have guests...I have these quotes ready. I have these people who gave me cutting-edge knowledge from people whose expertise I'm leveraging such that I don't have to be the expert. I'm just the one who gathers it.
And if you look at how most magazine articles are run, that's generally it. You don't get the expert themselves running it very often because most of them are either too busy or they're lousy writers. You get a professional writer, someone who can shape words for a desired effect for specific audience, and they take material that's out there. They gather it, they curate it, and they shape it, and then they make an argument, or they make a case, and they bring it together, and they make it palatable for that audience. And that's something I can do with these Mars experts, these space travel, you know, SpaceX and, you know, Elon Musk, and these guys. But other people could do it too, even if it is something like, you know, botany or bugs or volcanoes or anything else. So there are some ways for you not to have to be the expert, but you're becoming more knowledgeable by speaking to the experts, and then you've got it for your own project, but then you've got it for perhaps other purposes as well too, which might be worth pursuing. And even if not, you are doing the right thing by going to these experts because they might be the ones that when your book gets taken, they've got those blurbs on your back that give you somewhat of a sense of authority and support that other people are like, "Okay. This must be good. This must be, you know, worth looking at." So for that reason alone, in addition to just the idea of being authentic and clear and authoritative, those are great places to start.
Mary: What I love about your tips so far is this idea of sort of multi-purposing the work that you do, right? We only have that one hour a day or whatever to do our marketing activity, to do these kinds of projects. And so one interview can suddenly become so many different things, and then you hit that person up for a blurb in three years because you have that warm lead with them. And having a NASA person, to use your example, having a NASA expert or...God, you said some words there, some science and biology words that I just can't even retain. But now you have that person vouching for your project with a potential blurb, which is also incredibly valuable. And so it's not just you did this interview, and it's gonna go in one box and stay there, it's gonna hop out and do all these other things for you potentially. Even if you, Ryan, aren't a space journalist or, you know, a science journalist, maybe you have a science article under your belt. And that goes to your earlier point of, you know, we don't have to be precious. I never thought that I would set out to write a space article, but here I am. It's writing. I'm getting paid for it. I'm getting my name out there. I'm getting valuable experience. And it's not a topic that I could have ever foreseen writing, but here we are.
Ryan: So, exactly so, and that's one thing that I like to do is encourage people to follow their passions, because when you're following your passion, you're not doing work. You're doing something that you enjoy. And what some people don't think about is how their passion has them creating things that then become their platform. A good example of this is these blogs that become books. Like "Grammar Girl." I refer people to "Grammar Girl," Mignon Fogarty, all the time, because she's very good, and she's very funny about it too. But she's a grammar nerd. So that's her, one of her passions is being a grammar nerd. And so she started doing this grammar blog, and it got so big, it had so much of a following that it accidentally became such a platform that she was able to leverage it into a big multi-book deal, and all of them became bestsellers. They sold tons of copies because she had the brand that they trusted, and she had the platform. So people say to me, "I wanna do a YouTube channel about, you know, I don't know, science fiction video games or whatever." It doesn't matter because if that's the thing you're passionate about, you might wanna consider doing it. And if you end up doing something and there's any level of success, that can be part of your platform. Those are people that are listening to you, that pay attention to you, that value what you say, and for them, you are an expert. And I think those are always great things to do.
Even if you don't write the book or monetize that in an obvious way, it still fuels you and keeps you a happy, healthy human being by having an outlet for your creativity, which is a terrific thing, and I think that, you know, that's ultimately what we're talking about here with book proposals and all the other types of writing one might do. These are useful, productive and in some cases therapeutic outlets for your creativity, your interest, and your passion. In a world that feels so uncaring at times, to have those and be validated in whatever ways you can be, that's an amazing thing. I just hope that we try to at least consider the idea that you can turn that into a partial living if not a full-time living in some level of monetization because I do think art matters, I do think good work matters, and I do think that we need more great books and passion-led projects. And my hope is that your readers and other people who are out there, people who are paying attention, listening to podcasts, reading the books, and thinking about this understand that if they wanna put the time and energy into it, they can do it. I firmly believe that anyone can do this if you have the right mentality and you have a real good sense of purpose, of message, of outcome, and you follow the best practices that are pretty tried and true.
Mary: Well, you've segued me perfectly into, I think, the second half of this, which I would love to spend on some of those best practices, the nitty-gritty. Two things that I think you could speak very well to would be pitching magazines, some kind of short-form pieces, and how do we even go about doing something like that? What should the pitch focus on? And then, yeah, let's wrap up in a little bit by talking about best practices for book proposals. For this audience, I think a lot of people are curious about both of these if they're coming from a fiction place or if they're coming from a place of never having put together a proposal but are curious about it. So magazines, let's do it. What do I do if I have an article idea?
Ryan: Okay. That's a great question. So, one of the things I need to do is I need to understand who is the audience. So I write for some local magazines here, and, you know, it sounds really small, but many of them have 100,000, you know, readers or more. It's sizable, but it's not a national audience, which means they've got a geographic focus. So anything that I think about for that periodical or those periodicals, I need to frame in that mindset. And if I can't do that, then I've got an issue, and I've got a disconnect. And if you've got a disconnect from the start, I assure you, the editors, the decision-makers, will see it in a second and point it out as a flaw, or worse, they'll just give you a form rejection without bothering to explain to you something that's so freaking amazingly obvious that you should have seen it yourself. So you need to fully understand the demographic of the periodical or periodicals that you are submitting to. And the easiest way to do this, this is a little cheat for you, you know, this is pro-tip here. Look at the ads. The advertisers pay big money to figure out this exact same thing because, if you are a wine and cheese company, and you're pitching your stuff in a magazine that's a bunch of blue-collar people who can't afford it, you're wasting your money. So I assure you, the advertisers spend a ton of time verifying the exact demographic, and they're matching that up with the products that are in there. So, just look at those products, things being advertised, it'll help you get a really good sense of what that demographic is. And a number of magazines print and online have oftentimes freely available media kits, right? And those things often do say very important things like, do they have theme issues, and if so, what does that calendar look like for the next year? So you can pitch to a specific issue, which makes it seem like you know what you're doing. It often tells about circulation, perhaps oftentimes virtual versus print, but it oftentimes too has a very clear sense of demographic, you know, some pie charts and things like this that's really very useful. So take a look at those media kits as well as if they have advertisers kit. Both of those often have the same information, super useful.
But once you've got that, it simply comes down to a pitch, and the pitch to me is really three fundamental questions. Why me, why now, and here's what I've got. That's fundamentally every query right there. Why am I the one to write this? That's your platform, your expertise, your interest, your research, your connection to it, whatever it is. What's your relationship to the topic? Why now? Because if it's not now, well, then why am I publishing it. You know, you can get periodicals periodically. Why now, right? They like things that plug, you know, to a sense of time, right? And then the last thing is here's what I've got. You need to tell them. You need to be clear about it. And they don't have a lot of time for this stuff. So if you can put that all together in one page, that's it. You're golden. I often use bullet points because editors like to skim. You know, they won't admit that, but the reality is they're really fast and busy and everything else going on. If you can have three to five bullet points that says exactly what I've got, they can skim the other part. They'll assume the other stuff's there. But it's really kind of what's that content of that piece you're pitching. And if you can't do it in three to five bullets, I don't know what you've got. They don't either. You know, it needs to be that clear for them. So, that's to me the secret of a really powerful query or pitch right there. I think magazine people really appreciate that efficiency and that format.
Mary: So to bullet point number two, I do wanna reiterate that getting this editorial calendar, if you can at all do it, figure out when a magazine is running certain theme issues, keep in mind the calendar of just holidays and events and keep in mind lead time. A lot of people get frustrated in their pitching because they're pitching Thanksgiving stories to "Bon Appétit" now, this week because they're like, "Oh, that's right. Thanksgiving's coming up. I should probably get my Thanksgiving pitches dusted off." And "Bon Appétit" is gonna say, "Well, we put that issue together in August, but try us next year." So I think lead time, something that doesn't come up too much in book publishing, but in periodical publishing is everything.
Ryan: Oh, yes, so true. So back to my link it up here with the "Writer's Digest" piece. That March piece, I had to turn that in last month, so whatever the math is on that, you know, four months. So three to six months is usually what it is. So if you wanna do a Christmas piece for next year, you should be thinking about it right around May. That's when you should probably be talking about it, you know, good six months out, because, even if that's too soon, you're better off being too soon than too late, because too late is an automatic no. Too soon, all it will be is, "Pitch me in a month on this one," right, or they'll sit on it for an extra month, whatever it is. That's a much better position to be in. So absolutely, too soon is way better than too late. And remember, not all periodicals are made equally. Print periodicals take much longer because they actually have to produce the things, right? They got a ship to a printer, they gotta mail out. All this kind of stuff happens. So it just takes longer. An online-only periodical can go live in an hour. So, their lead time might be very different, and that's something that...you'd need to figure out what that is. So newspapers, you know, by contrast oftentimes operated at a much, much faster pace because, you know, today's news is in, you know, tomorrow's garbage, right? It's [crosstalk 00:36:27.903] a bunch of bigger case here. You gotta adapt to that accordingly, and consequently, too, they have a different angle on subjects than magazines. Magazines stick around longer. Right? They sit on shelves. They sit on doctor's office tables for oftentimes weeks and weeks. Newspapers come and go. They have a different kind of purpose, a different sort of readership, and a different kind of expectation from those readers. So, you might be able to shape the same kind of piece. For a magazine approach, that's different than perhaps certain kinds of online venues like a blog, and that's very different than a newspaper piece. So again, we could be thinking about, "How can I take that one core topic and spin it off for these very different audiences with their very different set of needs and maybe get paid three times for the same story?"
Mary: Yes. Not verbatim the same story, but the same material. I love this approach because I feel like people don't naturally think in this way unless they've been trained to do so. I love this takeaway. In terms of targeting a specific periodical, how general do you recommend making your pitches? Because I know some writers, they wanna get into "Oprah," by God, they are gonna study every word, they're gonna write pitches only to the editors of "Oprah." They are gonna write in the house style of the magazine. They are gonna really, really tailor their pitches. And some people, they're like, "Well, you know, I have a pitch that could be good for "Oprah," maybe for "Real Simple." I don't know. I'm just gonna try everybody." How specific and how tailored do you like to get when you pitch?
Ryan: I oftentimes tailor mine fairly well, but I'm always thinking about what are the pieces that I could reuse and re-slant towards another publication. Oh, to give you a really good example here. It's not in magazines, but it's in books, but it's exact same thing. I did "Memoir Writing for Dummies," but we didn't pitch that to dummies first. My agent at the time knew quite well the head person at the "Complete Idiot's Guide"series. So she pitched my proposal to them, and within a day, we got a response. And it was good. It was a full page. It had lots of feedback. Ultimately, it was just a pass, but it had lots of useful advice. We re-slanted that proposal, you know. It was 90% the same, but we re-slanted it, which include even, one of the things I did, I actually mocked up a dummy. Like, a dummy, of the dummy's cover? I had originally done was the "Complete Idiot's Guide." So I threw that out, but I used most the text and just reworked it, but then I had some specific things that showed I understood my audience and, you know, what they would want. It's the same thing with magazines as well, too. I always reference a recent article. I always, always, always. It proves number one that I've actually read an article or at least their periodical at some level, which I would guess they think some authors never done.
Mary: Some don't. To be honest, some people just, you know, open up a firehose and throw their pitch no matter... If there's an inbox, their pitch is gonna land in there. Some people really don't take the time.
Ryan: Well, it's just...if you think about the submission process in general and the times that you've gotten back those form rejection, you know, "Dear contributor or contributors. Your work or works were not approved." It's like, it doesn't mean anything, and it's like the ultimate blow-off. And to me, a fairly generic kind of a, you know, query letter or pitch feels that way. To me, it's really analogous to go into a bar and, like, trying to talk to every single girl at once and saying, "Oh, you are so terrific. Please have a drink with me." And it's like, "Well, who are you talking to?" "All of you." You know, it's just not gonna work, and psychologically, it doesn't make people wanna respond to you. It's a turn-off. It feels that they're not special, and it's not really for them. You know, instantly, there's a bunch of strikes against you. So unless you find a way to tailor it enough to prove that you've done your homework and you've thought about their audience, which is not the same as perhaps a competitor's audience that seemingly is the same kind of topic, it's unlikely to work. So I think you're making a terrible mistake if you don't tailor-make it at least to some degree. Now, does that mean you need to put all your eggs in one basket and just continue to like, you know, obsess over the "Oprah Magazine" and do everything? Well, that's up to you. If it's a dream, if it's a bucket list, maybe, you know, because some of those things, that's the only way to get in there is to, persistence and quality work over time, plus a little luck. You know, it took me 10 years to get into "Writer's Digest." I haven't been trying the whole time. I usually tried maybe about once every 16 months or so when something came up, and it just worked this time. So I guess the difference is that maybe my platform is bigger. Maybe it's a...I don't know. I have no idea. You know, it's a new editor now. I don't actually know the secret sauce, and sometimes you never know. And that's okay because there is an element of luck. There's element of just fortitudinous. You know, sometimes the no that you got is not because you're a terrible person or because your writing is awful. It's because they had a bad hair day or their dogs wouldn't stop barking in the background, or...
Mary: Stop.
Ryan: No, it's what happened, right, sometimes. And they don't tell you that stuff. So you just can't take these rejections personally. You have to just keep persevering. And that's maybe the best of advice at all today is that I know a lot of great writers, and a lot of them have given up. Just like I know a bunch of guitar players who are better than a lot of the best guitar players out there in bands right now making lots of money, but these people just quit. They just never wanted to do it. They didn't have the stick-to-itiveness. They didn't have the gumption to kind of, you know, do what needed to be done and just not quit. And I find that a lot of my writer friends who've succeeded, it's not that they're ungodly better than everyone else. It's just that they have an ungodly level of persistence that they just stuck it out, and eventually, your quality is gonna be recognized if you just keep doing quality work and you keep giving yourself opportunities. I firmly believe, I think most people have to believe that good work will eventually be recognized.
Mary: And to your point, honestly, I think that sometimes it's just, and maybe not a bad hair day, but that person, that editor is juggling so much on their end. Maybe they just scooped up a similar article. You know, you never know what's going on there. I was talking to a journalist friend of mine, and I asked her this. I said, you know, "Have your successes come from you pitching an idea that was just a home run or you pitching enough where you happened to get on somebody's radar, and eventually, they came to you, and they said, 'Okay, you know, you've been a thorn in my side long enough. I have a story for you. Do you wanna try and do it?"' You know, because sometimes that's what happens. Editors at magazines and at publishers, they wanna see that you are professional. You are coming up with ideas. You are just in their face not in unprofessional or annoying or creepy way, but you're just...you're there. You're coming up with stuff. You're bringing things to the table. Maybe one day they'll turn it around, and they'll bring something to you because they wanna give you a shot because you have been there. You put yourself in the path of success. You know, it's that quote, "Fortune favors the prepared." You've just done enough where you can now receive the opportunity. I think that's definitely a part of it too.
Ryan: So I just spent the last four days up in Pennsylvania up at the Highlights Foundation with Jane Yolen and a bunch of kid literature writers. And one of the things that Jane Yolen...and for those of us who don't know Jane Yolen, you know, she has almost 400 books out.
Mary: How can you not know Jane Yolen? You'd have to be under... Yeah.
Ryan: It's possible. It's unlikely but possible. But she's got, you know, almost 400 books out, and she says one of the things that people do is they give up too easy with their, you know, their submissions, you know, "Oh, I can't sell this book." And she'll say, "Well, you know, how many people have you tried?" "Five." And she says, "Five? What is that? Get to 550 then come talk to me." It's that kind of thing. And you're exactly right. Persistence pays off I think, and also too, the idea is that these people, editors and agents and these gatekeepers, the reality is it's that it's a...on their retrospective, it's like a buyers' market. They have too much product coming in. So they're looking for a chance to say no because they just have to deal with the numbers, and there's just no easy way to do it. So, they're looking for excuses. So, if you give them excuses in an otherwise good proposal or pitch, they're gonna often say no. So, if you continue on the best practices, continue to be a professional, continue to give them quality product, even though they'll say no sometimes still, they're not saying no to you as a person or as, you know, in the larger sense the word, they're saying no on a specific project, and they may remember you that, "Oh, this was a really good writer. It's just their pitch wasn't right on this last part. It didn't fit, but maybe they'd be great for this idea." Just like you said, those opportunities might just happen or you just might make that opportunity for yourself by pitching enough times to enough with the right people that you eventually find that literary love match where you got that person who has just been dying for that, you know, nonfiction piece about, you know, how to start your own cupcake company or something, because their mom always wanted to start one and they don't know how to do it, and now they can have them read your book. You know, like who knew? Nobody knew. Well, if you keep sending it out, you might find those opportunities because if you have a topic that has any kind of legs and the reach, there's probably editors or people in their lives who might be thinking about or wanting that same information too. And there you go. That's a connection you could never anticipate, but you're unlikely to run across and have it work in your favor if you send out five times.
Mary: And that is something, that is another kind of pro tip that I've heard, which is when you...if you ever get a warm lead with an editor, with an agent, you can always ask them, "What is a project that you have always wanted to do, you know, that nobody has quite brought to you?" And, you know, they may say something completely out of your wheelhouse, and it's not a literary love match, as you say, or they may say, "You know, I've always wanted a cupcake shop, you know, expose." And you can be like, "Woo, girl, I got it for you," you know, and make some opportunities that way. Because, I think one of the big takeaways for me here is this idea of not being entirely precious with your work and what you wanna do. Of course, you wanna care about it. Like you said, you wanna be passionate, you wanna do it to your best ability, you wanna do it with integrity, but at some point, if you wanna write and you wanna make a living as a writer, maybe you write a cupcake shop expose. And that is not gonna be your crowning achievement, but it's gonna get some ink with your name on it out into the world, and you'll have it as a clip, and you will add it to your resume. And who knows? It'll be that much more to your name. A lot of new readers will potentially discover your work.
Ryan: Exactly true. I mean, you're so right about this. People would be well-served to say yes more times than not particularly early in your career. How do you know what you can't do unless you try? If someone says, "Can you write something on X?" Don't say no. Say yes and give it a shot, right? Because opportunities don't come across all that often. And if you get your foot in the door, you get your chance, do it and do it great. And the one thing I would say too is that even though it may not be the topic that you've been dreaming of writing about, I think that most writers can find a way into that story and into an appreciation or I even dare say passion, for aspects of that story to make you truly care about it, right? So that it's not just feeling like work and, you know, all the stuff that we don't wanna do, which is why some of us became writers in the first place, you know, we don't want real work. Find a way to get excited. Find a way to fall in love with those topics. And then, you know, then you have suddenly the joy that you've always wanted, and you're being paid for it, and you're producing clips, and good things are happening. You're making relationships, building your platform. All these boxes are getting checked. If you can do that, you know, have that internal pleasure about producing something you're happy about, and maybe learning something too just as a human being, learning about a topic the same way we watch the "Discovery Channel" or "National Geographic" or we read maybe "Time Magazine" or, you know, a topic today, whatever, you're learning something. And that's a lot of what can happen along the way with any of these. The big projects like the proposals or the smaller stuff like the, you know, the blog posts or the magazines or, you know, the inserts for the, you know, periodicals, the newspapers, or whatever. There's opportunities there to grow in a lot of ways.
Mary: So, we have completely veered off course on the proposals, which is kind of what I came into this interview wanting to talk about, and it's been wonderful. Don't get me wrong. But we're almost out of time. And I know you've written an entire book on the subject, but if you had one or two tips just about the most intimidating parts of nonfiction book proposals or the parts that most people tend to get wrong, do you have like just a couple super expert pro tips to take this home?
Ryan: I think I do. I think I do. So, one thing that I think a lot of people get wrong with book proposals is they feel like they need to make it big. I have sold the last nine books that I've written off proposal with one sample chapter. That's it.
Mary: What?
Ryan: It's, you don't need to write 40,000 words to prove you can write it. A pro-reader can tell if you can write in a couple of pages. I give them a full chapter so they can see me begin a topic, follow through with it, you know, kind of weave and bob, and kind of, you know, [inaudible 00:50:19] variation and then wrap it up nicely, and then rinse and repeat for all the other chapters. If that doesn't do it, a second one's not gonna do it. You don't need more than that. So unless they tell you absolutely need more, you don't. So that's one tip there too, because that's where a lot people spend all this time. Then you start asking how much more, and then you end up writing 50,000 words. And that's the exact opposite of the whole point of this. You're writing a book proposal, not the book.
Mary: I laugh because my book proposals would make you cry then if that's the case, literally 40,000 to 50,000 words.
Ryan: No, I would not cry, no, maybe a little It worked out though. So as long as things work out, I'm not gonna get too unhappy about it. So that's one great tip there. Another one, and this one gets skimped on so, so often. You gotta understand that the whole process of producing, you know, a magazine piece or, you know, a book as much is you're solving problems, right? When you're writing nonfiction, you're solving people's problems. And the problem we never think enough about is the problem the editors have. The editor has to sell this thing to other people in their company. And if you help them do their job, they're gonna be really thankful, and also too, you're helping them do their job, right? And how you do that is you provide the argument for the book, which is to say you're doing the marketing information. And so many writers blow this off. They just knock off a couple of things. No, no, no. I would put a lot of thought and time into this. Think about the competing books and how is yours different. That's crucial. Because if you're just doing something someone else did, you're xeroxing a xerox, right? Nobody wants that, right? There's a deterioration when you xerox a xerox too. So it's even worse than just a copy. It's a deterioration. You don't want that. And then the other part too is just about the ways to sell the book. Like, who are specifically the audiences? So, like, when I did "The Weekend Book Proposal" book, I actually included almost the entire proposal in the book itself showing how I sold this, and that particular part I had more than a dozen groups of people that I thought would be likely readers or buyers for this book. So I talked about how many writers there are in the U.S. and how many teachers and how many...you know, all these different groups of people, the people who participate in NaNoWriMo, you know, all these numbers with as much data points as possible, as well as the sources for it to show I'm not making it up. So, that's a really important part of the process that helps give you a sense of the scope of the audience, because also too, if you do that math and work it out, and it looks like only maybe 20,000 people is like the audience, well, we understand not all 20,000 is gonna buy it. So, maybe this isn't a big enough book to even sell to a major publisher. Maybe this is a small press, indie press, university press, or even self-published because even in best-case scenario, you're only selling 10,000 copies. And that's not all.
Mary: For an article.
Ryan: For an article.
Mary: That's one thing that I would find myself saying when I was agenting was, "I'm just not sure there's enough there. This might just be an article." But that means that the idea, maybe it doesn't have the life that you envisioned for it, but it still can get out there in front of eyeballs.
Ryan: Absolutely, totally right. Yeah. You might have grossly overestimated the scope of it. It might just be a nice long 3,000-word article or 5,000-word article or something like that. And the last thing I probably would say in terms of best practices in terms of a nonfiction book proposal or just something to kind of keep in mind that a lot of people don't quite get right is I think that the voice of the piece, the end product, should kind of be conveyed throughout the entire proposal. I firmly believe that you can kind of suck them into, you know, your project in so many different kinds of small psychological ways there. And it just feels like a unified cohesive purpose-driven, audience-driven, inquiry-driven sales document that feels just well thought out and structured and unified if you think of it, not as a bunch of just little parts that you're gonna kind of knock off and you're gonna use your freshman comp class kind of, you know, thing here, and just, no. Like, a clear, unified voice, and just give them a sense of the personality of both you as a writer, you as a person, and then this topic as its thing. I think that's oftentimes very captivating, and when an editor has to make a decision between three proposals and they're only gonna take one, sometimes it's those smaller touches that just make it feel more memorable and more well-thought-out, more purposeful in a way that sometimes other ones feel disjointed or formulaic or overly formal. I think people oftentimes feel the way to be persuasive is to write, you know, like an English teacher in high school or something, this anonymous kind of weird, overly no contractions. That's not it unless that's your book. And even if that is your book, don't let it be your book because that's terrible.
Mary: The audience now across categories is just expecting more vibrant colloquial voice. That is just something... It's funny. I talk to a lot of clients about this in terms of, you know, don't write like you believe you should be writing. There's just some kind of novel element out there that you need to sort of put on a different voice just because you happen to be writing X, Y, or Z. Like, a fantasy voice, it tends to...writers of fantasy tend to fall into this trap a lot. They adopt fantasy voice. They don't adopt their own voice, and it really, really comes across. I do think voice is crucial no matter what you're writing. I have one question for you that I actually wanna know the answer. Because, when you have a query letter for a novel, it is obviously a very different thing than the novel itself. One is prose and one is kind of more pitch summary language. Now, with a nonfiction book proposal and a query letter for a nonfiction book proposal, what are we including in our submission when we go out on submission with a book proposal? Do we need a query? What does it look like? A non-fiction book proposal is a pitch. A query is a pitch. How are they not the same thing?
Ryan: So, that's a great question. And a lot of that is just answered by the practices of the, you know, the target audience. Most people say what they want. And some of them wanna make an initial decision off of a query of some type, which is, you know, generally speaking about a one-page document. A lot of them just say, "Send me the proposal, you know, sample chapters or whatever." Number one, you always follow the instructions if they give it to you. That's just great professional practice in general. If they give you directions, follow those directions. That's always a good choice. Now, if they're not clear or if it's fuzzy or you have other ways to go...to me, I wanna get to the actual proposal as soon as possible only because I think that's where they see what the book actually is gonna look like because they actually see parts of the book. Everything else until then is filtered through people's impressions, interpretations, and potentially bad hair days and all these other things that get in the way. You imagine less and you have more evidence with the larger, you know, sales document, which is to say the nonfiction book proposal. So, I try my hardest just to get to that. And I think a lot of people, even if they say they want query letters, sometimes you can move directly to the other thing either just by setting that one alone or sometimes you can write and just ask, or another thing to do too, and this is another bit of great advice, meet people. Go to conferences. Meet these editors, right? Because then you can start off the conversation by saying, "Hey, it was great meeting you at [crosstalk 00:58:13.553] so back last January where you talked about XYZ." And then you quote to prove you were there. "I particularly liked what you said about..." And then you say something very specifically that you wrote down and got right. I'd say, "That stuck in my brain and got me thinking about...when this proposal came to mind, I realized immediately you're the first one I had to send to." Who's gonna stop reading there? Nobody.
Mary: Good. Yes.
Ryan: They're gonna keep reading. So, that's the kind of thing that, again, gives you a fair chance of...it's not more than a fair chance. It's the best chance for a good enthusiastic read, which is all you can ever hope for in this industry. There are no guarantees, short of maybe nepotism and Trump stuff. I'm gonna come with it with a clear palette and an open mind. That's it. And if you lead with something like I just said there, that connection and a sense of professionalism and something that was well-thought-out and targeted specifically for you, I think that gives you a very good shot of a good, thoughtful clear read. Maybe it's a no, maybe it's a yes, maybe it's revise and resubmit, but that's all you can ever hope for, and that's a great way to get it. So maybe invest into going to some of these conferences and opportunities to meet these people. Don't stalk them. Don't chase them in the bathroom. Meet them in appropriate ways and don't overstay your welcome. But, you know, get enough that you can respond to it, referred to it that it's a personal connection and then give it a shot. If you do that enmass in a larger sense of, you know, the numbers game without going crazy, I think if you've got a product that actually has a viable audience out there, this is the way to kind of move forward with it and give yourself the best shot at being the one who actually writes that book.
Mary: And I can tell by the emphatic table pounding that that was the climactic wrap-up of this interview. I love it. I just have to thank you so much for your time, for your expertise. Ryan Van Cleave, author of "The Weekend Book Proposal" and a bunch of other things. Your blog, again, is "Only Picture Books," and just thank you so much for the wealth of information you've brought to writers. My hope for this interview is that people who maybe don't write nonfiction will try their hand at it and try to learn more about it, because I really do think that most writers have more than one thing in them. And this is just another way to keep writing and keep creating.
Ryan: You've got it exactly right. I'll give you one last bonus tip too because I'm a giver. [inaudible 01:00:41] I've heard from so many pro-writers, and I know this for myself, that the first three books you write generally tend to be garbage and, you know, because you're learning. Be aware that the first book also that you write might be hot garbage too. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. There's a learning curve that happens with everything. And so, yeah, start soon, practice, figure it out. You will get better at it. You will figure this out quicker. And one of the things I've noticed most in terms of my own growth as a writer, is I now know very early in the process where a project is too low for my time and efforts. And that's what can happen the more that you practice is you start to figure these things out very, very quickly, and you don't spend a lot of time going down tunnels in which there's no cheese at the end.
Mary: Working smarter, not harder for that cheddar, literally. Ryan Van Cleave, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Mary Kole. This has been a "Good Story Podcast."
Ryan: Thanks, Mary.
Mary: Thank you so much for joining us for "The Good Story Podcast." My name is Mary Kole. "The Good Story Podcast" is made possible by my team, Abby Pickus, Amy Holland, Amy Wilson, Jen Petro-Roy, Jana Van Roy, Kristen Overman, Paige Polzin, an audio and video wizardry from Steve Reese. You can find us online @goodstorycompany.com, goodstorypodcast.com. I'm marykole.com, that's Kole with the K. And also find your writing partner at critcollective.com, And here is to a good story.
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