Tag Archives: book reviews

How to hire a writer

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If you’re reading this, it’s probably safe to say that you like my writing. And maybe you’ve even thought you’d like to have me write something for you, for money. Fabulous! The question is: HOW?

It’s pretty simple, actually, but since I do get a lot of emails from very confused people who think I will ghostwrite entire books for them for free (with the promise of “50% of the sales!”), I thought maybe I should take the time to write up a few notes on how to go about contacting writers with your business proposal.

In other words: here’s how to hire a writer without pissing them off.

Be Specific

First off: I get a lot of email, and if your subject line doesn’t make it clear that it’s a business proposal or request for a quote, I’ll delete it. I get enough spam trying to sell me Viagra and enlarge my (nonexistent) penis, and currently I’ve got jerkoffs trying to “optimize my website” who don’t know the first thing about SEO or the CAN-SPAM Act. If I don’t recognize your name, and your subject line sounds spammy, or your email is hotguy6969@hotmail.com (sorry, bro), your email is going into the trash.

Secondly, I need to know what you want me to do for you. I don’t need vast details about how exciting and intriguing and full of suspense your life has been, but if you want me to complete a project, you should tell me what it’s about.

As in: “I need a personal biography of about 500 words for my press kit.” Or: “I want you to write some blog entries for my website.” Or even: “I’m interested in writing a book, and want you to be a co-author.” Just tell me in one sentence what type of project it is.

Finally, if you have any type of budget I’ll need to work with, let me know. If you want a $25 biography, sorry, you’re SOL. That ship sailed 6 months ago; you missed the boat. BUT if you work for a non-profit organization or registered charity, or need to pay me on an installment plan, or otherwise have legitimate concerns about footing the bill, please don’t hesitate to mention those things in your email. (Briefly, of course.)

Also, for those of you completely unfamiliar with typical writing rates, check out my post “What to pay a professional writer” to get a feel for what I charge for my services.

Time Frame

Okay, so you know what you want, but you need it by last Tuesday. Fuck. Now what? How about this:

TELL ME.

As in: tell me about the time frame in your first email. If it’s a rush order, it’s going to cost more, but it’ll get done on time. The trick is that you’ve got to let me know that you needed it by last Tuesday and your boss is pissed and you need some kind of miracle worker or time machine to get out of this sticky situation, because while I can OCCASIONALLY work miracles, I’m still (tragically) unable to mind-read.

Don’t Assume I’m Free

This is a bit of a rarity, but sometimes people will just drop emails in my inbox, saying “I need this by tomorrow night!” And I mean completely out of nowhere. Yes, people I don’t even KNOW (not to mention people I’ve never done business with) are somehow assuming that I will get right to work, dropping everything just because they threw it at me.

Huh?

My question is: who does this? Seriously, if we have NO working relationship, NO contract and you send NO instructions on top of it all, please do NOT assume I’m free to do the job. Seems like it should go without saying, but since it’s happened, clearly the obvious must be stated.

Also on the subject: I don’t typically work for free, so please don’t approach me with “work” that doesn’t pay unless there’s a truly outstanding reason.

Don’t Assume I’m Too Busy (or Expensive!)

Paradoxically following up my last tip, never assume I’m too busy to help you out. While I don’t like last-minute jobs that are dumped on me by random weirdos who don’t have a clue, I DO take on all kinds of projects, from the very large to the very small. If your budget is outside of my norms, but there are some kind of extenuating circumstances, we can work something out. Maybe in the form of a payment plan, maybe in the form of a trade for something I want or need. Rates are negotiable depending on circumstances, which is why I don’t publish any hard and fast fees on my site.

Ask Questions

While I can be annoyed by clients who ask too many questions (i.e. the ones who are virtually hovering over me and micro-managing my work instead of just letting me do it), I actually much prefer people to ask questions up front. Why? Because it’s way better than assuming we are both on the same page, or that they know something they really don’t. So please feel free to email me and ask questions if you don’t understand something or have special circumstances that need to be addressed. I am more than willing to discuss topics related to working together, so don’t be shy!

Also under this heading is my “if it’s not on the menu” policy. There’s a list of things that I do, or have done, or will do again below. But there’s also stuff that I’ve never tried before, or haven’t thought of doing yet. So if you don’t see something on my menu of available options below, don’t assume I won’t do it; ASK!

Keep in mind, however, that there are certain things I absolutely WILL NOT do, including:

  • Writing term papers
  • Doing your homework for you
  • Writing anything illegal or unethical (and if you have to ask, it’s probably illegal or unethical)

Types of Writing I Do

This isn’t an exhaustive list of the types of stuff I will write, as mentioned above, but it’s a good place to start:

  • Press releases for events
  • Personal and corporate biographies
  • Interviews
  • Reviews (book, music, film, stage)
  • Newsletters, and articles you can use in your newsletter
  • Magazine and newspaper articles
  • Blog entries for your website, whether one-offs (guest posts) or regular contributions (columns)
  • Toasts and speeches and poems for weddings, anniversaries and other happy occasions
  • Eulogies and memorials and tribute speeches for solemn occasions
  • Technical documentation for online help pages or user manuals
  • Ghostwritten or co-written books (depending on the topic, and subject to a significant retainer fee)
  • Short fiction, poetry, novels

Still interested?

I’m easy to work with, and I’m always interested in learning about new projects! Check out my articles on How to work with a writer and What to pay a professional writer to learn more about the process of working with me, or email me at editor@buttontapper.com to discuss working together.

The Bomb by Howard Zinn

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As someone who has cultivated an anti-authoritarian reading list since the end of high school (or beginning of college, depending upon your viewpoint), I was eager to read Howard Zinn’s final contribution to the annals of modern history, The Bomb, published this month by the daring muckrakers and perpetual shit-disturbers at City Lights.

As a student growing up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, Zinn’s bestselling history textbook, A People’s History of the United States, was part of the syllabus for my junior year of high school, thanks to a hippie teacher of mine whom I didn’t entirely appreciate at the time (thank you, Ms. Davis!). While many high school students have been fed the standard My Country ‘Tis of Thee from K through 12, at least some of the students at my high school were exposed to the fact that maybe, just maybe, our government wasn’t always operating in our best interests, particularly when it came to things like the Vietnam War.

But step back in time to that “noble war,” WWII, where “the greatest generation” proved themselves courageous crusaders against fascism. The unquestioned evil of Hitler and the unquestioned good of the Allied Powers are tackled by Zinn, who was himself a bombardier in the U.S. air force, dropping unnecessary napalm upon a seaside resort town in France called Royan. At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Zinn was a young married man, and could only view the headlines with youthful exuberance: the war was going to end, how could that be a bad thing?

As he explores the reality of the situation in his book, Zinn conveys his belief that ultimately, neither atomic bomb was necessary to end WWII, and in fact the seeming purpose of these bombings was to exhibit American ingenuity and technical prowess: we had nuclear bombs, and Russia didn’t. Thus the beginnings of the Cold War.

Even more interestingly, Zinn acknowledges his own culpability in the Royan bombings, which were also not strategically necessary, but showed off more American ingenuity and technical prowess with the invention of napalm. He comes to a Hannah Arendt-ish conclusion that evil is committed in the most banal of circumstances, by those who stand idly by and allow atrocities to be committed in their names, rather than by those who take up the task of barbarism like evil supervillains with maniacal laughter at the ready.

We are all culpable. We are all at fault. And we must all overcome our propensity for rage, racism and retaliation. Happily, Zinn points out that:

Against the claims of a violent “human nature” there  is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel.

And yet when it comes to rejecting evil and doing good, Zinn notes that “It is the immediate victims—or tomorrow’s—who have the greatest need, and the fewest wrenches. They must use their bodies (which may explain why rebellion is a rare phenomenon).”

I, siding with Zinn, propose that rebellion need not be difficult, nor even time consuming. Sure, we must use our bodies rather than wrenches in the machine, but we are creative, capable souls. All we really need are a few good books to start the journey, the healing, the revolution. Zinn quotes from classics like John Hersey’s Hiroshima (another book I was charged with reading, thanks to my progressive high school curriculum), as one of the books that began his own moral awakening. Readers of The Bomb might well cite Zinn’s work as an influential eye-opener, ushering in their own personal eras of peace and prosperity.

Here’s hoping.

Review copies don’t get returned, and other facts of life

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During my days as the Literary Arts editor for my school newspaper, The Link, I was initiated into the exciting world of book reviews. As a book geek, the idea of reading free books was a big deal to me, and once I discovered that pretty much all of the publishers throughout the U.S. and Canada would send me stuff from their current catalogues for free, just because I told them I wanted to review their new book for the paper, I was hooked. Paying for books became almost a thing of the past, overnight, as I was able to get my hands on most of the hot new titles I’d been anticipating for years.

This is but one of the perks of working in the publishing industry.

Now, on the flip side of this equation, you have independent publishers and print-on-demand publishing, where the budget for sending out review copies is limited or non-existent. With POD publishing, the author typically has to pay for each copy he or she chooses to send out, and I’ve read many articles from small and independent publishers who say it’s not worth their time and money to send books out for review at all. Fair enough. I would think the same might apply to the big houses as well, who are sending out books to bloggers who may or may not ever get around to writing about those books, and whose reviews don’t make much difference in terms of jacket blurbs (i.e. those glowing words of praise from big-shot writers like Margaret Atwood and whatnot) anyway.

All of that aside, there are still rules to requesting review copies of books, as well as etiquette involved in actually completing the reviews so that the publisher doesn’t write you off as a twit, a thief, or worse. For instance, you should always ask for books you actually intend to review, and preferably the types of books that fit in with your publication’s mandates. At Black Heart, we review mostly books by indie publishers or authors who have chosen to self-publish, along with anything we feel has a theme of rebellion or being an outsider. Although I might really want to request a review copy of a new book that falls outside those parameters, it would be dishonest for me to misrepresent these intentions and get a free book that I never intend to review, even if I will actually read it. Ya dig?

Secondly, if you don’t ever write the review, the publisher probably won’t want to send you any more books, so write the damn review! It doesn’t have to be nice, but it does have to be your honest opinion. I, personally, also prefer to abide by the Quill & Quire standard of book reviewing, which holds that while “bad books happen,” this isn’t something you should take to a personal level. Go ahead and say you didn’t like it, but don’t make it into a vendetta against the author, and certainly don’t review books by authors you have personal relationships with (positive or negative), as this will bias your review.

Finally, most publishers like to see “tear-sheets,” or copies of the review once it’s published. If you publish a blog, all you have to do is send them an email with the link to the permanent URL and voila! Done. It’s just a common courtesy to follow up, particularly if you really enjoyed the book and wrote a nice review. This will show that you’ve done your job, and if you’d like to request more books at that time, it’s a good way to reconnect with the editors and publicists in charge.

Now, on the flip side of things, if you’re an author sending your book to a publication with the intention of getting some glowing words of praise to use on your book jacket, there are also rules. The first and most important of these is this: Book reviews are not necessarily going to be positive.

Yes, I would LOVE to write positive, happy reviews of every book I’ve ever read. But I can’t, because not every book I’ve ever read has been worth reading. (For instance, I would really like to get my time and money back for having read all of those terrible books by Heidegger when I was a Philosophy student, but I suspect ol’ Nazi-lovin’ Heidegger and his estate aren’t going to be coughing up any time soon.) That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, and even if some people think your work is brilliant, there will always be someone out there who reads it and thinks it’s crap. People are weird that way, so don’t take it personally, but do understand that it’s all a roll of the dice.

Secondly, and equally important to remember is this: Books sent to publications for review will never be returned.

Why? Let’s put it this way: your book is going to be beat up by the time it’s been read through, because most reviewers like to take notes, stuff them into bags when they go to work in the morning, fling them across the room when they’re mad at their significant others, and occasionally have to use them to prop up wobbly table legs.  (The books, not their significant others.) And, frankly, once you send the book in for review, it’s no longer yours. You will never get that copy back because that’s life. You can’t go around giving people stuff and then asking for it back; this is not a borrowed copy that you lent to a friend, it’s a work copy you gave, with no strings attached, to a professional reviewer to use for his or her work. That work involves reading and commenting on your work, and therefore the material in question now becomes the property of the reviewer.

So basically, don’t ever ask me to send your book back to you. Not only will I be irritated and delete your email, but I’ll also never look kindly on any of your work again. It’s just not done, and it’s actually quite rude to insist that the reviewer do you this kind of favor when it was assumed that you understood the rules of play from the beginning.

And now that you do, there’s no reason to ask, is there?