1. If you have more than one idea or book you are working on, pick ONE of them to lead off with, and don’t mention the others for a while. (The woods are full of amateurs who have drawers full of unpublished manuscripts.).

2. In a bookstore, browse through lots of other books in a similar category, books you admire and think are in the same style as yours.

3. Look in those books’ acknowledgments sections to see if the authors thank their agent; thereby you will accumulate a list of agents who handle this kind of material.

4. Research these agents online to get their addresses, names, and submission criteria. If a website is good, you can also get a feel more broadly for the kind of work the agency represents.

5. You can then send a highly professional, crisp query to any number of your selected agents at once. However, don’t make it look like a blanket submission. Tailor each query letter to the specific agent; mention if possible other work you admire that the agent represents. If you know one of the agent’s authors personally, get a personal reference. Be sure your query letter gives background on you personally and why you are a credible expert on the subject addressed. Publishers think of nothing but “platform” these days — authors who teach in the field at a reputable institution, who run workshops nationally on the subject, who have a popular blog on the subject, who have already published material on the subject in national media and thus have a pre-existing audience.

6. To bypass some extra steps, you can attach to your query an outline or short prospectus of your proposed work, together with a short sample of the actual prose. (A sample is important, since summaries often don’t make a work sound attractive.)

7. Keep in mind that an agent is running a business and looking for commercially promising projects. Agents will not be interested in helping you develop your ideas, or helping you select good ideas to develop, until you have already proved you can be a solid breadwinner for them. You’d do best to arrive with a very clear, professionally presented package. Good agents are overwhelmed with prospects (we get more than 30 submissions a day) and in many cases they don’t even have time to answer a query unless it is irresistible.

8. Remember, the gods favor the persistent.

—by Jill Kneerim

{Jill Kneerim is the co-founder of Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Since she is not actively looking for new clients, Kneerim put together this list to help prospective authors find agents who are.}

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1. Demystifying Books

Last Friday I hosted a gathering of two editors, four agents, and about 30 midcareer writers at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The session set out to demystify book publishing and was intended to help journalists understand what role books might play in our careers.

The speakers came from small and large agencies, and small and large publishers, in Boston and New York. The journalists, at Harvard for a year of study and reflection, are considering what part books play in those careers, especially as newspapers shrink, staff jobs disappear, unpaid bloggers proliferate, and book publishing is buffeted by forces as disparate as Apple, Barnes & Noble, and the recession.

Here’s a random sampling of ideas that surfaced:

Editors and agents (at least these ones!) love working with journalists, because they are able to write on deadline and because their areas of knowledge and insight are so diverse.  But, as Helene Atwan of Beacon Press pointed out, journalists need to unlearn the art of the short paragraph and even the gift of quick study. Books, in other words, are a place to go deep, write richly, take the time to be thoughtful, and see the complexities in subjects.

Editors and agents think simultaneously about the quality of the idea and the existence of a market for it. This is why in developing a book proposals it’s important to research and write about the competition—the existence of other successful books in an area shows that people will be willing to plop down $25 for a book on the subject. As Wendy Strothman explained, if she’s going to spend months with an author developing a worthy idea, she wants to make sure that there will be a payoff in eventual sales.

Agent Jill Kneerim described helping authors take an angle that are too narrow and too focused (on, say, a particular event in 1915) and broadening it to encompass a larger sweep of history (a particular country in 1915, for example). This allows the author to tell a more epic story and enlarges the market for the book.

The panelists expressed mixed views on Twitter. (Is it really worth an author’s time? Does it enable one to develop and express strong and interesting ideas?). Agent David Patterson reminded the crowd that an intense focus on writing the book should trump online omnipresence. But all agreed that Web sites are now de rigueur for authors. Laurie Liss pointed out that it’s important for writers to have a place where people can find their work if they do a Google search.

Editor and publicity guru Lissa Warren noted that when a proposal comes before an editorial board, she and others are looking for a reason to say “no.” If an author doesn’t have a platform—i.e. a built-in audience that has already been developed through a career of covering a certain subject, a Web site, or a Twitter following—it may be hard to have faith that word on the book may get out.

Want to learn more? Read Jill Kneerim’s memo on “How to Find an Agent.” Check out Wendy Strothman’s “Suggestions for Writing a Non-Fiction Proposal.” San Francisco agent Ted Weinstein teaches a “Book Proposal Bootcamp,” offering a free audio version of the workshop on his Web site.

Another helpful resource for proposals is Michael Larsen’s book on the subject. Finally, my own primer on advances and royalties is in the Sin and Syntax Salon.

If you have found other useful resources for writers dreaming of publishing a book, please add them in the Comments, below.

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1. Jill Kneerim on How to Find an Agent
2. E-books, twit wit, and Susan Orlean

If you’re thinking about writing books, it’s helpful to know some of the basics about how much money to expect, how advances work, and when—if ever—you’ll collect royalties. There’s much confusion out there, especially since all we generally read in the press is that Sarah Palin got $5 million for her book, Barack Obama $500,000 for his.

I did some quick research, added to it what I know from my own experiences both as an author and editor, and then ran this summary by a few agents and editors to make sure it’s sound.

For starters, forget that $5 million advance. Most first-time book authors are lucky to get $50,000. (And at a small house or academic press, $5,000.) Any advance that is six figures is considered strong. In these tentative times, you have to be a pretty big celebrity—or an author who’s already got a track record of producing bestsellers—to earn in the sevens.

What’s more, that advance doesn’t all come at the front-end, and it’s shared with an agent. Read on….

Advances

An advance is actually an “advance against royalties”: A publisher gives you money when you sign a contract to produce a book, but you have to earn that money back through book sales before you start earning additional money from royalties.

Suppose your book will be published in hardcover and will sell for $20. If your royalty is 10 percent you will get $2 per copy sold. If you get a $10,000 advance, you will need to sell 5,000 copies before the book “earns out” and you start to receive additional royalties.

The amount of the advance is based on how many books a publisher thinks it can sell. Classically, an advance reflected a book’s earning potential in the first year, less costs to the publisher (for designing the cover, paying for paper, printing, binding, shipping—not to mention marketing and publicity). This isn’t always true any more.

Advances are almost never paid out all at once. Traditionally, half of the agreed upon amount was paid on signing the contract, with the other half due once the revised manuscript was delivered and accepted by the editor. In recent years, publishers have often been dividing payments into thirds, payable one-third on signature of the contract, one-third on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript and one-third on publication. More and more payments are being divided into even smaller chunks, perhaps with a portion of the advance payable upon publication of the paperback edition (!), for instance.

Royalties

Authors agree to accept as payment for writing and delivering a book either a percentage (royalties) of the profits from the book’s eventual sales, or else a straight flat fee (work for hire).

Under a standard book publishing contract, authors earn a royalty on each book sold. Hardback royalties on the published price (list price) of trade books usually range from 10 to 15 percent. On trade paperbacks it is usually 7.5.

An “escalator” means that the royalty rate rises after an agreed sales threshold has been reached; for example, the royalty might be 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies, 12.5 percent up for the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent thereafter. Royalties for special sales—books sold at special prices—may be lower, e-book royalties higher.

Some publishers may offer lower royalties by basing them on the “published price” rather than the “price received”—i.e., a percentage of the publisher’s receipts from booksellers, which is usually much lower.

Work for hire

In certain cases a publisher may approach you to write a particular book or part of a text on a payment-only basis or as a work for hire. In these cases you will not receive royalties and you may not even hold the copyright.

Different publishing houses, different books, different advances

Most of the books we see in bookstores and on bestseller lists come from what we call ‘trade’, or general, publishing. But there is also academic publishing, professional publishing, and educational publishing.

Manuscripts may be printed in hardcover, trade paper, or mass-market editions. And then there are e-books. Whether a book is published as one or the other is determined by other books on the market, review potential, the concept and intended audience, and the quality of the writing. Sometimes paperback rights are sold separately–even to another publisher.

In academic, educational, and professional publishing, advances are small to paltry, and royalty rates tend to be lower than those for general trade titles; the payoff may be in robust sales for a built-in audience. In trade publishing, advances to authors are standard, but not the huge advances that attract headlines, especially for first-time authors.

Titles with color illustrations integrated throughout may have lower royalties because of the higher production costs.

The fine print

Almost all traditional publishers issue royalty statements every six months. This means that almost all authors are paid only twice a year and then only if their advances have earned out and there are royalties owed to them. Further, even if their advances have earned out, authors still never know how much money, if any, they will receive during any given pay period. This is because, usually, until receipt of the royalty statements, they never know how many books they have actually sold, or what reserve against returns is being held by the publisher for that pay period.

Reserves against returns: Unlike most merchandise, creative works like books and CDs are sold on a returnable basis. That means that if a retail bookstore orders 100 copies of an author’s book and doesn’t sell any of them, then the bookstore can return all 100 copies to the publisher, for credit—which the publisher charges back against the author’s royalties, as well. (Mass-market paperback books have only their covers stripped and returned, while the books themselves are required to be destroyed. Sales of these stripped books are illegal.)

In order to avoid overpaying the author, the publisher will withhold a percentage of the author’s royalties against returns. These returns tend to be higher at the outset, as reserves usually taper off during a book’s life. If, for instance, unsold books are being returned to the publisher at a rate of 50 percent—meaning that out of 100,000 books shipped to retail bookstores and wholesalers (who also stock outlets such as supermarkets), 50,000 books have already been returned unsold—then the publisher may withhold 50 percent of the author’s royalties, as a reserve against returns. (The amount of the reserve is determined by the publisher.)

Subsidiary rights: The licensing a book for foreign markets, magazines, movies, etc.) will increase an author’s income for it. However, there is no guarantee that a book will ever produce any sub-rights income.

Royalties are paid only on the sales of new books. Under current copyright law, authors earn no royalties whatsoever from the sales of used books, no matter how many times the used books are resold.

Sources:

Interviews with various editors and agents

http://www.publishing-services.co.uk/faqs_royal.php

http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm

http://www.brandewyne.com/writingtips/authorspaid.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Book-Advances,-Royalty-Checks,-And-Making-A-Living-As-A-Writer&id=812872

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1. Constance Hale on Risk, Freedom, Discipline

I soon learned that she is no more immune than the rest of us from the ins and outs of starting and stopping, trying and failing, hoping and despairing. She was just curious about my opinion.

Of course I offered it.

The easiest kind of writer’s block to define is just that—a block. That moment of sitting down to page or screen without a shred of an idea about where to start or what to say. The block makes its presence known in front of a deadline, when you have no choice but to sit. The “block” soon turns to agony. I’m not good enough to write this article, goes the voice in the head, or my editor will hate whatever I do, I’m going to be fired (or my article rejected), I am a fraud! I am headed for disaster and humiliation.

Some forms of writer’s block, though, mask themselves. Like procrastination. It sounds like just a bad habit—“I could write if I just put my mind to it, but I let myself wait till the last minute.” The thing is, if procrastination is motivated by fear—if it is the agony of writer’s block that you are putting off—it is writer’s block.

The worst kind of writer’s block is even more specious. This is the kind I suffer from. I often take on minor projects instead of the major ones I really want to do. Or I pitch safe stories over those that excite me but expose me to some risk. Or I write another language book—the book my editor wants—instead of the historical narrative that really makes my heart jump.

So, what do you do when your creative juices freeze up? I like the advice Mark Morris gives, mentioned in the previous post. Just start working, thinking about why you love writing rather than the fearsome task ahead. Just do the thing that reconnects you to the passion for your art.

I have some rituals that help me get started, that get me past those moments of resistance or fear. First, I start my mornings by sweeping my studio floor, or the patio outside my door. I put on some wonderful music—I’m partial to Hawaiian slack key guitar, Mozart, or Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert—and I putter. I give my imagination some room to roam. It needs to be awakened. When it kicks in, starting to write feels like fun rather than a chore.

For some projects I keep a journal, and I write there—some freewriting, or just random thoughts—before I formally begin the assignment at hand. Again, it’s about letting the juices start to flow. And sometimes  a few lines from the journal, or a metaphor, are so good they qualify for the finished piece.

Finally, I recognize that I can’t just be left brain all the time, focusing on projects I’ve been assigned, or work I know I can sell. I have a practice I call “risk writing” (see “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline”). Every few pieces, I let myself write something that I want to write, and I write it the way I want to write it, and the length I want to write it in. Some of my favorite all-time pieces have emerged from the risk writing. (“Souvenirs” traces a complex of relationships between me, my mother, and Paris; “Cutouts” came when I remembered a vision from the past.)

These risky pieces allow me to develop new muscles—maybe a new voice, or the ability to handle certain kinds of material. And in writing them, I am warming up for that other book in me, the one that makes my heart jump. When the time comes to start, I’ll be more confident that I can carry it off.

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1. The answer to writers block: big courage

My ears perked up when a dance teacher asked the choreographer whether he ever feared being blocked, and what he did when he “dried up.” Morris described being creatively blocked as a kind of occupational hazard: “Successful artists always have this certain fear of being discovered to be a true charlatan,” he said.

Morris’s advice to those who find themselves blocked: “Just make up a dance a day. Change it. Then make its opposite. Then throw them both away. Watch something else. Make another dance. Read more books and learn more music.

“My courage is bigger than my fear,” Morris added. “But I have big courage.”

We can’t all have courage as big as Morris’s, but we can cultivate it. There are two other important kernels in his advice: First, don’t let your inner critic stop you from making more art. Just keep making things. Second, don’t stop reading and learning—connect with the things about your art that you love, and that set you on fire.

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1. Unblocking writers block
2. Mozart, Morris, and strange metaphors

Nearly every writing book on my shelf suggests the same somewhat mysterious daily practice. It has many names: “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; “first thoughts” in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones; and “early morning writing” in Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers, prefers the somewhat ungainly but increasingly popular “freewriting.”

According to these gurus, beginning writers as well as seasoned ones freewrite for many reasons. Sometimes, as Cameron writes, it empties your mind of the garbage that would needle at you anyway. I find it a useful channel for my ever-churning, over-active brain. It’s efficient therapy—cheap and fast.

Of course, as Peter Elbow reminds me in Writing Without Teachers, “Freewriting isn’t just therapeutic garbage. It’s also a way to produce bits of writing that are genuinely better than usual: less random.” It might not happen always, or even frequently, but better bits will happen eventually. I sift through a lot of garbage and sometimes get lucky and discover a buried gem or two. Often it is in a digression or an unlikely place. It could be a new way to think about something—an opening, a shining light.

Often writers freewrite to get their creative juices flowing. “It is the bottom line, the most primitive, essential beginning of writing,” suggests Goldberg. And, it can eliminate the need to toss those first few paragraphs, and a bit of the ego, when you finally do sit down at the computer.

If you’re aching from transitionitis or seized up with writer’s block, a freewrite, like a deep-tissue massage, might limber you up.  Brande recommends, “…whenever you are in danger of the spiritual drought that comes to the most facile writer from time to time, put the pencil and paper back on your bedside table, and wake to write in the morning.” In freewriting, thoughts often get worked out, unleashed. And, more often than not, the muse will appear. In my freewriting, I sometimes find that a choice, uncensored bit of honesty percolates up. It’s a time for my inner editor, that ever-present critic—who can be found staring over my shoulder whispering, “boring” or “Come on Sarah, can’t you find a better verb?”—to go on sabbatical.

Freewriting admits no judgment, no criticism, only freedom. Cameron says these lines “are not meant to be art, or even writing. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird, to write down.” No one will see this. And if they do, the writing will probably be illegible. Mine looks like my doctor’s signature on a prescription. I can barely decipher the words when I reread them. If you tend to write your deepest, darkest secrets when you freewrite, and write legibly, and are prone to leaving things around, then do yourself a favor. Lock the freewriting up. Or, shred it. Unless, secretly you want it to be discovered.

The writer Martha McPhee is a friend, and she once recommended when I was searching for a subject, “Write what’s raw.” There’s no better place for rawness then a freewrite. Find the words that hold the most power and write about them. You might just stumble onto your next topic.

Many writers recommend freewriting first thing—pre-caffeine, pre-good breath, pre-newspaper, pre-chats with humans.  Brande suggests writing when you are in this dream-like state. I often leave my notebook, pen, and timer next to my bed for just such mornings, but my 7-year-old seems to set his internal clock just ahead of mine, arriving bedside moments before my alarm beeps. Until he becomes a teenager and sleeps till noon, my early morning freewrite is fantasy. Until then, I write freely when I can.

And so should you. It works.

—Sarah Baker

◊

So How Do You Do It?

Freewriting is a powerful technique for both beginning and seasoned writers. It can help quiet your mind, warm you up, let loose uncensored thoughts, and even banish writer’s block. Every writer discovers what works best for his or her needs, but here are some general guidelines:

1. Write longhand with a pen or pencil in a notebook. No typing.
2. Write for 10 minutes (initially.) Set a timer. Some people like to write first thing, when they are still in a dreamlike state, to capture unconscious thoughts.
3. Keep your hand moving the whole time, and I mean writing, not scratching your nose.
4. Don’t edit or cross out. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar, or handwriting. Don’t ever look back and never judge.
5. If you get stuck write, “I’m stuck.” Or, in my case, “My lower back aches,” or “My shoulders hurt.” Sometimes I just write, “dumb, dumb, dumb” because that’s the way I’m feeling. Once, “platitudes, platitudes, platitudes” emerged when I sensed I was holding back from the truth.
6. Don’t think. Don’t get rational. Go for the raw.
7. Do it every day even if your dog needs walking, a letter needs mailing, or you have an unexpected urge to cook chili.
8. Take risks. Go deep. Be free. This is for your eyes only.

Enjoy.

—Sarah Baker

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent producer for Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two children.}

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Just to give you a sense of the oddness of the image, these naked, floating, turning palms rose from a stage deep in the heart of Boston (in a building with crystal chandeliers, ruby damask walls, curving staircases, and gold-leaf everywhere) and deep in the heart of winter (on a night whose 17-degree cold plummeted to a wind-chill factor in the aughts).

I was watching Mozart Dances, by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and my imagination was being lifted and loosened like those imaginary glass jars.

Upstage, a backdrop was turned into a giant canvas, covered with enormous watercolor brushstrokes—one part mad child making fingerpaintings, one part mad giant making like Motherwell.

The dances were sometimes balletic, sometimes modern, always surprising: pliés, bourées, jetés, and attitudes, but all done barefoot, barelimbed, and with ironic twists: arms floating up all pretty, then squeaking into something angular and awkward; a circle dance suggesting Matisse, then flattening into the Virginia Reel; languid ballerinas freezing into Egyptian vase ornaments, a butterfly morphing into an insect, a bird into a mechanical doll, a corsair into a sailor cruising the street. The lyric vocabulary of ballet devolved into the vernacular, the poetic turned pedestrian.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

As I headed back out into the bitter cold, I thought about Mark Morris’s creative instincts. He never lets himself cross over into cliché, and he plants, plays with, and then supplants our expectations. His language is always surprising, fresh, and funny. I can’t get that one image out of my head, the palms floating up from the floor. They are terribly close to something I’ve seen before, yet remain completely unfamiliar: Sperm, propelled by wriggling tails? Lily pads, levitating out of the swamp and dancing on their stems? Lima beans, sprouting up into the air rather than up through the dirt? Periscopes, pushing up through water and taking a look around?

Images organic, evocative, surreal. And entirely original.

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1. The answer to writers block: big courage

Our senses are like tender shoots of foliage. They respond to nature, closing down in the cold. And they respond to human nature, curling up in the face of searing criticism, lying in wait when colleagues are wintry, turning to steel under stress. Then, in a place like Hawaii—where I grew up, where I seek creative renewal—they slowly open with light, warmth, the gentleness of tradewinds, and the kindness of old friends.

If the tropics pry open the senses, they humble the writer. It’s one thing to discover the powers of perception, quite another to find powers of description. It can take days for my muscles to let go, longer for my senses to open, and even longer to connect words to images.

Ten days into my most recent trip, and two hours after seeing the butterfly, I hit the Hau‘ula Loop Trail. My hamstrings, my heart, and my breath struggle awkwardly to find a rhythm on the root-strewn hillside. I weave in and out of shade and light, along a corridor of tufting ti plants, past a stand of stately ironwood, into a grove of Cook pines. I crest the hill and raise my eyes. Off to the left, the vertical trunks and horizontal branches of a silk-oak frame the western face of the next ridge, resting in shadow. The late-afternoon sun casts its light on the branches in the foreground—the feathery leaves of the silk-oak shimmer silver, the fronds of a palm arc gold, the lime-green scythes of a koa cut into the sky.

In the background, a hundred greens stitch patterns into the next ridge: the shaggy gray-green of ironwoods, the waxy emerald of African tulips, the dark-teal arrowheads of Cook pines, the olive tufts of wilelaiki, the khaki canopies of eucalyptus.

I am seeing green, as if for the first time.

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David Carr, in “Why Twitter Will Endure,” confesses his own infatuation with Twitter, and defies conventional notions about that brand of social media. He sees the possibility of narrative in “short-burst communication” and applauds the economy and precision forced by text messages. But he concedes that “the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

In Talking Story, Shelly Runyon writes about the Twitter feed of Susan Orlean, and what it tells us about Orlean’s particular brand of short-burst communication. For you doubters who snicker at the Morse-Code-like rhythms of Twitter and insist that Tweet feeds are fluff, Orlean may change your mind. The author of The Orchid Thief proves two things about micro-narrative: first, that it is possible to tell stories in 140 characters; second, that it takes a damn good writer to do it.

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susanorlean BTW, my animal sitter at home reports that Laura has become a total raging maniac rooster madman, complete with rooster rage. Oy. – November 11, 2009

In a grassy upstate-New York yard fit for farming, Susan Orlean gives a camera crew for The New Yorker a tour of her utility shed. Half of the shed is occupied by seven chickens. Outside the shed is a fenced-in area, resembling a petting zoo. Chickens zoom past the cameras as Orlean squats down just inside the yard. Three birds rush over to snack on the tomato half in their dutiful owner’s hands.

Orlean points to a black-feathered bird with white specks and a scarlet crest. “This chicken was a sweet little chicken,” she says. “The guy I bought her from had named her Laura, after the character in The Glass Menagerie, and she’s turned out to be a rooster. A big shock to everybody.”

Almost every day, Orlean writes one-liners just like that about her chickens on Twitter. It started with her just tweeting her life, discussing her family and career. Then something clicked. Her fans fixated on the birds. They followed her chicken tweets, re-tweeted them to friends, and tweeted her back. It became a chicken-tweet movement, inquiries about chickens flying fast at Orlean. All the while her following proliferated, growing to six thousand by last June:

susanorlean Do I get a toaster or something when I hit 6000 followers? – June 19, 2009

susanorlean Whoa! Send toaster immediately! –June 21, 2009

Eight thousand in July:

susanorlean Hey, thank you all for pushing me into the toaster-and-a-blender category (8000 followers—but I know you just love me for my chickens). – July 10, 2009

And double that today (and growing).

With all of this notice, the natural next step for a staff writer at The New Yorker was to pitch a piece to her editor.

susanorlean Got a thumbs-up on my chicken story, so I’ll let you all know when it’s running. My editor’s comment? “Buk buk”. – September 8, 2009

On September 28, 2009, The New Yorker published the anticipated Orlean chicken tale, “The It Bird: The return of the back-yard chicken.” The story chronicles her impulse to purchase egg-laying hens and her discovery that she is a part of growing trend. The article is characteristically provocative, a survey on the suburban life of the egg-laying fowl intermixed with the dry wit of Orlean’s Twitter feed.

“Chickens seem to be the perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes. “I do detect a little overripening on the edges—I’ve noticed some late-stage phenomena such as chicken diapers, for people who want their chickens as house pets.”

Orlean argues that chickens will endure, and have endured, through all manner of fads, whether as farm animals, pets, as food producers in hard times, or as designer-bred show-chickens. Today, they are poster chicks for the organic and local-food movements. But it is Orlean’s sentiments as a pet-chicken owner that brought thousands to her feed. These readers engage with Orlean in a way impossible even five years ago. Orlean involves them in her creative process through tweets, which in turn motivates her audience to read her print stories.

The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.”  Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.

“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”

Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.

susanorlean One benefit of writing a story about chickens: Every time you write the word “chicken,” it’s amusing.  – August 17, 2009

—Shelly Runyon

{Shelly Runyon lives and writes in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently enrolled as a MLA Journalism degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School.}

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