Mindy: Today’s guest is Mary Kole, a freelance editor, author and blogger whose goal is to help writers of children’s literature create compelling stories for young readers. A former California and New York literary agent for the Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Movable Type Literary, Mary has spoken at over 75 writer’s conferences and workshops across the world, has been deeply involved with organizations including the SCBWI, Writer’s Digest, and NaNoWriMo. Her blog on children’s writing and publishing, Kidlit.com, receives an average of 17,000 hits per month. It has been named one of the “101 Best Websites for Writers” by Writer’s Digest every year since its inception in 2009. Her book, Writing Irresistible Kidlit has sold 11,000 copies. Mary has also worked as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, and was named one of 20 writers to follow on Twitter in 2017. She currently works as a freelance editor with over 500 clients per year.
Mindy: Mary joined me today to talk about making the switch from agenting to editorial work, and how a relocation spawned her editorial company.
Ad: Make your pages look professional with Vellum. Margins, headers, page numbering, font, line spacing - all happen automatically with every book you create. Generate ebooks for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and others. Or deliver a beautiful print book to your readers. Visit http://www.tryvellum.com/pants To learn more. Vellum. Create beautiful books.
Create Beautiful Books With Vellum
Mindy: You were previously an agent in the kid's publishing sector. So what made you decide to branch out of agenting and onto different avenues?
Mary: I would love to tell you that I had this all planned out, but it was a personal decision in that I met my husband and he wanted to move to the Midwest, which is where he's from. I was out in California, that's where I'm from, moved to New York city to agent. I had agented pretty successfully from California, Andrea Brown. Um lot of the agents there are based out on the West Coast and she's made a great go of it. So, but I wanted to be boots on the ground. I really love New York city. My stepdad is from there. I'd always been traveling there. I wanted to try living there. And I met somebody at Book Expo, romantically and decided to move out to New York. They were in New York. We decided to move in together right away because that's what New York real estate prices do for a relationship.
Mary And they make you make dumb decisions. Of course, we had basically nothing in common except for like the high of Book Expo America. And pretty soon we broke up. So I was just hanging out in Brooklyn, I met my soon to be husband in that neighborhood. So if I had never moved to New York for one romantic relationship, I probably never would have met my husband hanging around in Brooklyn. But as soon as he and I decided that we were getting serious, we wanted to start a family, we made just a boring cost of living decision to move to Minneapolis, which is where he's from. I just didn't want to agent from, not New York city. Like I said, Andrew Brown and Co. Do really well with it, but I just didn't feel like I could represent clients as well as I could have when I was out in New York. I really grew to love it and I decided what can I take from that work? That was my favorite part, which was working one on one with, with clients on the writing craft itself. I hung out a shingle as a freelance editor and a, this'll be my, my eighth year in business editing and I'm just getting started in terms of what I do with and for writers. I think it was a great turn for me in my career.
Mindy: So speaking of New York city and the centralized East coast feel of publishing, as you were saying, Andrea Brown, they are centered out in the West coast. But most of publishing is in fact in New York city and a lot of people don't realize that you can be an author and kind of be located anywhere. It's not a necessity for you to move to New York city. Thank goodness. Because my income certainly couldn't handle that. But to be an agent because there is so much face to face involved in what you do as an agent, working lunches, et cetera. Is that something that you can speak to just about the New York city centricity of publishing?
Mary: Again, there are agents outside of New York. There's even an agency here in Minneapolis. I did not elect to join them because again, I think you have to know yourself. Some people do really, really well outside of New York and some publishers do really, really well outside of New York. I was an intern at Chronicle books in San Francisco, which is a beloved publisher and that plays on the same playing field as a New York publishers. It has its own kind of quirky voice out there but definitely holds its own. That being said, you're right. I, New York city is very much the epicenter for me. It was very much an issue of seeing people at social events, seeing somebody across from you on the F train, the way the Andrea Brown did their editor visits... Because I think an agent is only really as good as their contacts, right? So you have to get to know all of the editors.
Mary: The way Andrea Brown would do it is we would take these week long trips we would just book out, Hey Harper or Tuesdays Random House Wednesdays and we would go and troop to editor after editor cubicle after cubicle and sit down with people. And I definitely got a lot out of it, but at the end of the day it really did turn into meeting after meeting of, well I'm looking for literary quality and commercial appeal. You know, because you only have 15 minutes with somebody, you're not really gonna get to know their tastes 100%. So for me, why I thrived being in New York was these kinds of chance meetings or the ability to go to a deeper lunch, which wasn't just this kind of roll call meeting style. I do think that there are some limitations to the just New York mentality of publishing being centered there. It's kind of an old school industry and I think especially on the West coast, there's a lot of progress being made toward digital content. The film industry is very LA focused on the opposite side of the spectrum. I feel like the two could be better bedfellows the East coast and West coast. Because I, I do feel like the two industries have a lot to potentially teach one another because at its heart they really are similar. We're trying to reach people and entertain people and tell stories to people.
Mindy: I think it is interesting that the two, the two industries which share so much and including talent pools are so diametrically geographically opposed.
Mary: They should all come to Minnesota. Come see me!
Mindy: Well, I'm in Ohio. So maybe we could do a push for that. Like something really central.
Mary: Ohio, they're surprisingly on East coast time. I did a lot of work with Writer's Digest based in Cincinnati. I always had to reset and remind myself that y'all are actually on East coast time.
Mindy: We are on East coast time, but we very much think of ourselves as Midwesterners. Trust me on that. Whenever you see any kind of meme or anything about the Midwest, everyone in Ohio is nodding their head.
Mary: I buy that. Yeah. And one of my former clients, Lindsay Ward, lives out in Cleveland. I've actually done a lot of great conferences in the Buckeye state.
Mindy: Ohio is loaded with writers and Writers Digest, since you bring it up, is centered in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's always been interesting to me that Writer's Digest is there. It originally started, believe it or not, as a farming and writing endeavor. Their parent company is F & W Media and that was what it was. It was farmers and writers.
Mary: That is what I found out because, so my book Writing Irresistible Kid Lit is published by Writer's Digest Books, which is of course a subsidiary of F & W media, or at least it was until everybody went bankrupt and now it's Penguin Random House. Hello, new overlords. When I first started seeing F&W on my contracts and my checks, I was like, what? What is, what does that stand for? I looked it up and bot the farmer connection that I was like, Oh, Ohio. Now I get it.
Mindy: Farmers and writers. We're called the heart of it all. Like that's our motto. I think we should just be called farmers and writers.
Mary: What else is there to do after a long day of farming? Write the next great American novel.
Mindy: Coming up, Mary’s book, Writing Irresistible Kid Lit, and the joy of ushering a project from inception to publication alongside an author.
Ad: This episode of Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire is sponsored by Leaner Creamer. Here at Leaner Creamer we believe starting your day off healthy and lean with a cup of coffee and our creamer is the best way to begin a healthy new chapter. Our creamer is keto and paleo diet friendly. Sugar free, gluten free, lactose free. Leaner Creamer can also be use as an aide in weight loss due to the natural supplements that help boost metabolism. Visit LeanerCreamer.com now, and use promo code FIRE15 to receive 15% off.
Mindy: So you mentioned your book Writing Irresistible Kid Lit and that is a craft book that's available from Writer's Digest. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that book and why having a book specifically geared toward writing for kids is necessary if you're an author and that's your niche?
Mary: I had this blog Kidlit.dot com and I had been blogging there since 2009 with all kinds of advice, not just craft. But publishing advice, industry advice for people who want to write and publish a kids' books, which goes from about picture book to the young adult novel. I got a lot of traction with my blog. I got a lot of exposure and a lot of people interested in it, especially when I was agenting. When you're agenting people kind of glom onto you and you know, you get a lot of action on your blog and a lot of social media followers and all of that. But I was able to parlay that into a book deal. And for me, having a book deal, a nonfiction book deal was very legitimising. It was a big priority for me. Not just for myself and sort of my brand as Mary Kole writing knowledge, teacher, guru, if you will.
Mary: I hate that word by the way. I would never douchily self-ascribe it to myself, you know, but just to establish myself in the industry as somebody with enough to say that could go into a book. But for me it was also a really wonderful process of writing what I call just the best book report that I've ever written because I excerpted 35 novels popular at the time from the middle grade and young adult shelves to sort of make up the backbone of examples in my book. I thought it would be very useful for writers not to just hear me say something, but for me to then point it out in examples from the shelves because those are the people that are actually applying this stuff and creating great fiction. It was my deep, deep pleasure to read all of these books, select the quotes that I wanted to use, you know, organize them.
Mary: It was like writing two different books and I would love to do it again. It's been a long time since Writing Irresistible Kid Lit came out, but I still hear that it is out there helping people and I love that. I'd probably focus on a less niche topic next. So I'm really happy that I got to speak to the children's book audience, but now I don't just work with children's books in terms of my client mix. With Mary Kole editorial, my, my editing business, I advise my clients all the time, like become the King or Queen of your niche. I would try and, where I am, blow it out a little bit wider and do something that compliments not only children's books, but also takes me out of that niche.
Mindy: I remember very fondly your kid lit blog and site because I was querying, right when you were really kinda hitting the peak of being a children's agent that honestly everybody wanted. You were definitely the example of A listers that people were looking at and I relied upon your blog and your posts and your tweets because I was querying for roughly 10 years and it was my own fault. I wasn't doing the work. I very much wanted to be the writer that is in the ivory tower and just writes something so awesomely moving that agents are tripping over themselves to get ahold of it. I didn't want to have to do the work of writing a query letter and learning those skills because it's a different sort of writing. It is a piece of marketing. Finally, I woke up and I joined a forum that doesn't exist anymore, but at the time I joined a forum. I ended up learning so much and I fully credit it with teaching me finally how to write a query letter, but during that time period, I relied very heavily on a kid lit.com so just out of curiosity, is kidlit.com still a functioning blog then?
Mary: Yeah, it is a very much a functioning blog. I post frequency sometimes fluctuates, but I try to post there once or twice a month. I was recently doing a workshop series, so people submitted novel openings, middle grade and young adult and I kind of deconstructed them. It's been over 10 years of kid lit and so I do have about five or 600 articles on there that are pretty evergreen. It's given me a lot of really good organic search optimization, marketing, you just can't buy that sort of thing because the blog is so old. I went through and optimized everything, so the blog is still very much serving up kind of topical articles to people. I'm going to keep it alive and kicking for as long as I can just because it sits up among many resources for writers and that's still a really big point of pride for me. I'm, I'm really happy that it can help people.
Mindy: So you've mentioned a couple of times your editorial service, which is simply Mary Kole Editorial and obviously you have plenty of expertise after being an agent for as long as you were. But why don't you tell us a little bit then about your editorial services and what you offer and what you work on?
Mary: Happily. So when I moved here to Minnesota, like I said, I wanted to work with writers directly in a way that wasn't dependent on me being in New York. I started Mary Kole Editorial. You can find it at MaryKole.com And that is Kole with a K. I provide services for children's writers but also people outside of the children's book space. I do a lot of business in picture books, but I also do a lot with novels and that for me is kind of the, the dream edit for me is a big juicy novel that I could really sink into. I'd done a lot with memoir, which I love because a lot of the fictional storytelling principles still apply to memoir. It's just the source material is a little bit different. I do everything from, Hey, let's get on the phone and talk about your idea and see if there's something there, to query letter edits, to what I call the submission package edit, which is very popular, which is the query letter, a synopsis and first 10 pages. Pretty much what you'd need to send to an agent or a publisher.
Mary: I work a lot with Indie clients where I'm like the last line of defense before they upload their manuscripts onto KDP or whatever. I do really a lot of high level overviews and also really in depth sort of line editing, developmental editing where I'm commenting on the creative sides of the project, the craft, the characters, the plot, the sentence level voice, word choice and syntax stuff. So I pretty much, my menu of services is really long, but that evolved based on what I got requests for over the years and so it's not like I offer just two things. I think at first blush some people might be a little bit intimidated away by the website because there is so much there, but I've tried to organize it by category or what do you have that you're working with? Is it just an idea or is it a complete manuscript?
Mary: So I do a ton. It's my full time job. I work 50 to 60 hours a week. I have a team of nine people now supporting me altogether. We are the Good Story Company. It's really grown. I'm, I'm my family's breadwinner. My husband was able to step back at his job. It's been an amazing, amazing business for me creatively for my family, for my team. I've developed some awesome client relationships. I have probably thousands of writers that I've worked with. I do a lot like 500, 600 projects per year. Some of those are query letters. They're not all novels or I'd never sleep, but I just get to see people progress through their writing journeys. You know, it's, if I synced up with you 10 years ago when you were still querying and now you know, seeing where you are as a multi published author, it's like, Oh, you know, like it's so fulfilling for me to kind of see people through the realization of their dream. Really. I mean at the heart of it, that's what we're really talking about here. It's the joy and the privilege of my life to, to be in that business.
Mindy: Oh absolutely. I agree. And I can understand the feeling a little bit because I have participated in Pitch Wars as a mentor a few times and one of my mentees actually shares an editor with me and a publishing house and her book comes out March 3rd which is the same day my next book comes out. And it's just so cool that now one of my mentees is a publishing sister with me now and we have a book coming out on the same day. And so I understand that feeling of like almost like a proud parent where you're like, Oh, you did it!
Mary: Right. Yeah. And it's just like whenever, whenever somebody is successful, you know, I, I get these wonderful emails and they're like, Oh, because of you, because of you. That's not the approach that I take at all. It's like, you know, I was there on the sidelines and yeah, I gave you some advice. The advice was easy for me to give because I have worked with thousands of writers at this point, but it's you that ran the marathon, you did the hard thing. I just gave you a couple of pointers along the way. Now if only my husband would listen to my advice that would be so great.
Mindy: I feel the same way. I offer,I do query critiques on on my blog, which is Writer, Writer Pants on Fire that goes alongside with this podcast. And I do query critiques there every Saturday and I will have people reach out to me. You know, they'll be like, you critiqued my query six months ago, eight months ago, two years ago, and I just wanted to tell you that I signed with an agent today and thank you so much. And I feel similarly and that it's like, you know, I can give advice all day long - and I do. It's up to you whether you are going to do something with it because plenty of people, and I'm sure that you've run across this too as well from an editorial standpoint. I will give editorial advice and I get the response was like, well, I don't think that you understand what I was trying to do there. And it's like, okay. I mean if that's how you feel, but you know, you, you paid me for the advice, you got the advice. What you do with it is up to you. If you want to ignore it because you think, I don't understand what you were trying to do there, that's fine. You go for it. But it's the people that actually internalize criticism in a way that is not defensive and make changes. They're the ones that actually, as you were saying, they finish that marathon.
Mary: I can count on one hand, probably in the last eight years, how many times I've gotten that defensive reaction and I think, I would imagine this might be the case for you too, but people tend to self select a little when they come to an editor. I've only had a couple of people that were coming for the gold star for the validation and not actually looking for critique. There were a couple people who were definitely surprised that I wasn't like, Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. You should publish it immediately. But I think for the most part, I've been very lucky in my client base that most people come to learn. We haven't always agreed on everything, and I have no ego baked into the work that I do. I don't pretend that I'm the end all and be all, and I just say, you know, if, if we disagree on this, that, or the other issue, take the wisdom, leave the rest.
Mary: I don't expect people to agree with me 100% that being said, I've been very, very, very lucky in, in the type of people that I think are either drawn to me specifically or are drawn to my work or are drawn to hiring a freelance editor. My prices are at the top of the, the potential range for editors and that is completely intentional to be honest. I bring in a lot of people who are ready and willing to make the investment and they realize that it's going to be a process rather than the people just looking for a couple of cheap pieces of advice. Honestly, you'd be surprised when I was an agent, I would get that reaction so much more often than I do now as an editor than as an agent. I wasn't actively giving critique really. I was just giving yes and no answers.
Mary: You know, it was very binary. A rejection didn't always land very well and I would hear about what an idiot I am and how this is the next big thing and how I've missed out. And then of course all of those emails would be going to like Mr. Brown because the person hadn't done any of their research. So they were like, they saw Andrea Brown. And that wasn't even like meant for me, but it went to my inbox. So there were definitely some dicey interactions with writers who maybe hadn't done all their homework. I could not be happier with with the relationships and the clients I have now because I really, for the most part, am working with writers who came to learn and they're serious about it.
Mindy: You mentioned too, a good point about the editorial relationship. Even my editor will tell you, my editor is fantastic. He is Ben Rosenthal at Katherine Tegan and I love him. I think we've done, Oh boy, six or seven books together now. We've done quite a few. I really just like him so much and, and we appreciate and understand each other, but we also don't always see eye to eye. And a lot of people, and this is a question I get a lot when I'm talking to people that are not in the publishing industry and they're like, well, what are some things that like your editor has made you change that you didn't want to change? And I'm like, Oh, you're misunderstanding the editorial relationship. It's like, that's not how this works and they really want me to have this. Oh, I had this horrible editor one time story and I'm just like, no.
Mindy: All of my editors have been fantastic and I know that there are some editors out there that are not so great. I'm aware of that, but I've had three different editors. Bottom line is it's your story. If you don't want to change this, if you think that this particular point has been hit hard enough, I'll back off. You know you're in charge here, it's your story. I want you to be happy with it. I would say very rarely if never, have I ever gotten an editorial letter that I was like, yeah, 100% everything you said is correct and I will be changing it, but once you get over that initial knee jerk reaction of, Oh, I have to do all this work. Now, most of the time, 90 to 95% of that editorial letter is right on target.
Mary: I talk about receiving feedback a lot, not only because I give out feedback all day and I want it to be well received, but I think there are definite stages. It's like the five stages of a feedback receipt where I don't even check in with writers until like a solid week has gone by. I like send my notes. Not that my notes are devastating, but it very much is sort of a fall over, dust yourself off and then kind of figure out what you're working with sort of thing. I think there are a lot of emotions that are just inherent to the process that people who maybe haven't gotten feedback before or haven't been edited maybe won't be prepared for. But I swear to you there is at least one Mary Kole voodoo doll somewhere that a client made in the heat of the moment after they got their feedback and then they were like, Oh nevermind, Okay. I see where you know, we can find some common ground here. And then the voodoo doll kind of like goes in the drawer.
Mindy: There absolutely are stages of reaction to your editorial letter. And this is something that I have talked with other writers about and aspiring writers is extensively because people do ask, you know, what is that like? And the answer is like, usually when you get your editorial letter, your immediate reaction is that, you know, usually yeah, you're a little bit defensive. A lot of people say that they either cry or they drink and I find that to be pretty true.
Mary: A lot of people do both.
Mindy: I actually have a friend that buys an edit cake, like a sheet cake, and she reads her editorial letter while eating the entire cake. And that is her, her coping mechanism. My own is that I tend to skim the editorial letter and I'm usually just fed up and disgusted by the sixth page and I'm just like, alright, I'm out. And then I come back to it like three or four days later and I'm kind of prepped for some of the things. And the immediate reaction usually is defensiveness. And the reason why it's defensive is because every single time I already know what's going to be in that editorial letter. I already know what I didn't do as well as I can. And so when I have that confirmed to me, I'm just like goddammit.
Mary: Absolutely on everything that you're saying. And I also eat my fair share of feelings, but I do the same thing. Like I think it's universal. I do the squint read and I'm very lucky that I have people on my team who work with me on projects, not the actual editing. But I have at least one proofreader to research comp titles and proofread a manuscript before I get to it. And we often kind of, if I'm working to solve a difficult editorial problem, I can kind of bounce things off. While there are a piece of feedback that I know I'm going to give that are maybe going to land in a difficult way. Sometimes if I get an email back from a client, you can just tell their reaction from how long the email and like how many sections and subsections there are. And I'm famous for doing like the squint read. If I'm nervous about something and you just know what certain projects you are going to pitch them on, something pretty difficult either to hear or difficult to execute, you're going to make a recommendation that you worry about how it'll land. And so what I get those long emails, I just kind of like squint and then I look at how they signed off, you know? So if it's like with all due respect, you know, I'm like, Oh,
Mindy: Oh no.
Mary: I give it to the person that worked with me on that project to read and I'm like, give it to me straight. Does this person hate my guts? I feel like there's a lot of emotion. All parts of the process.
Mindy: My editors, I've heard other editors say, yeah, they, they hold their breath when they send the letter. We hold our breath when we open it and I get that completely. It is a fragile working relationship. It's an interesting mix when you're in publishing or any creative endeavor, I'm sure where you're dealing with emotions as a part of your work. It's a really interesting intersection of the creative and the emotions. And at the end of the day, this is your job.
Mary: Of course the book comes out and everybody is friends and you're like, Oh my God, I love you, love you. You know, and then there are like ten emails in your history that are like, "with all due respect." We feel emotions as creative people. We write emotions, we anticipate reader emotions. You know, if we're thinking about our readers, we try to create emotions in the reader as we tell story. It's not software development.
Mindy: We're not talking about lines of code here where there's absolute answer. You know, it's, it's all subjective.
Mary: That's what makes the job so interesting though. That's what I love. I mean, I, I never show up to the same day twice. I've learned so many interesting things and write about so many interesting topics and heard so many interesting voices and just connected with so many people. I absolutely love it.
Mindy: Yeah, me too. Me too. Even though there are days when so many writers that I know, we just look at each other and are like, "this industry." And it just encompasses so much. That sentence.
Mary: Oh it's a horrific industry. No, don't get me wrong. So Good Story Company is sort of my umbrella brand, Mary Kole Editorial. Obviously every project has me on it as the principal and that's not so good for the life. Because of the number of projects that I work on. So I have gotten a team underneath me, Good Story Company. It was kind of my brand pivot where I could still stay involved and still stay at the helm and still do cool projects and maybe set up, you know, like a podcast, which I did. Good story podcast and the Crit Collective, which is a forum. It's like online dating for writers where you can post a call out into the ether for a critique partner and see what happens. So Good Story has allowed me to take a step back and kind of activate my team a little bit more. So we're all kind of creating social media content and blogging.
Mary: Everybody's kind of chipping in. So we have a Instagram channel and our Instagram strategy is very much posting inspirational quotes for writers. And we've had a lot of fun with that. We've got good traction, you know, it's like what, what are you going to do with an Instagram channel for a writer? Really? Like take pictures of stacks of paper and like people crying that, that's, that's a writers true Instagram when they're not trying to be fancy. So one of the quotes that went out I think a couple of weeks ago, I love - "A writer is a person for whom writing is harder than for most other people."
Mindy: That's the truth.
Mary: So that was Thomas Mann. "A Writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Because it's like when you do this for a living, when it's your industry and it is a horrific industry with so many flaws to it. You know we were talking about kind of East coast, West coast. I think that there's a lot that the West coast does right, that the East coast could learn from, meaning entertainment and digital media, all of those kind of more more contemporary West coast arms of the same entertainment. Pre publishing and writing are definitely the old school trunk of that tree. But I do think that there's a lot that could be sort of revitalized in the industry as far as how how projects are created and marketed. Writers really take it hard and they take writing hard and they take getting edited hard and it's like, I feel like people spend so much of their time just trying to get published, trying to get agents to and trying to kind of get over the wall that nobody talks about, like what happens once you're over the wall? It's like people say about parenting new parents they, they often wonder if they've just been lied to by everybody because everybody said how wonderful parenting is. But then it's like your baby's four months old and you're covered in poop and you're like, this has been a great big lie. Like I bought into the propaganda and now look what's happening.
Mindy: The hustle never stops. I'm more stressed now than I was when I was querying. I have so much more stress. That's simply because of the fact that once you have something, you know, when you're querying, you have nothing to lose. When you have something, then you're worried about losing it. And so it's like, yeah,
Mary: Come join us. Join us on the other side of the wall, people!
Mindy: I will always be thrilled to be a part of it. I love what I do. I love my job. Like you were saying, no two days are alike. I love that. And I, part of me actually loves the stress. I thrive on it. I thrive on the chaos. I'm in the right place, but it's not a happy, good time, fun carnival either.
Mary: I mean, there's nothing else that I would rather be doing. I cannot rest. Like just ask my team. I just hit them with like three new ideas today. I can't rest. I like the stress. I, I like agitating. If I have a good idea or I see, you know, a need in the market for something that we could do. I've been working with writers for over 10 years and I know the pain points, how to make myself a presence in their lives. And that's kind of all I really want to do is I want, I want to help writers and, and figure out what we could do about this crazy industry together.
Mindy: You've mentioned Good Story Company a couple of times it offers editorial services, critique, connections to other writers, webinars, editor training and resources. So as you said, this is kind of how you've implemented your own editorial business then and you can now delegate some of this work. So can you talk specifically about the Good Story Company and how aspiring authors can benefit from it
Mary: With pleasure. So like I said, I built a team and the initial impetus was just to have support with the editing that I'm doing. And I will be blogging at Kid Lit working under the Mary Kole editorial umbrella until nobody wants me anymore. Literally. I love it. That's what I'm going to be doing. But in the process of building my team of nine amazing individuals, now they want to be empowered to leave their own mark. For some of them, they've been with me two years already working in an editorial capacity. And so we're not even scratching the surface of what I want Good Story Company to be. But my dream is to get new writers kind of familiar with us and what we do. And so things like the Crit Collective forum, which are free are really cool resources that I frankly that exist because I saw a problem, a lot of writers would ask me, well where do I find a critique partner?
Mary: And I was just kind of sending them into the wilds of the internet. There are a ton of writing forums already, but I wanted a dedicated one stop place for this very specific function of trying to kind of post about yourself or look through other people's posts so that you could potentially find a critique partner. And it's been slow going, building a writing forum. But you know, it's a resource that I'm hoping to foster and I'll keep paying for the hosting and the software for as long as as long as I feel like writers need a place to find critique partners. My other ideas for Good Story would be to give sort of a platform to my current editorial assistance train up a new batch and then let Kristin, Jen and Amy, for example, do their own editing under a new editorial umbrella.
Mary: I'm also really, really fired up about marketing this year. So there may be something, whether it's a class on marketing for writers or even a service based component to helping writers with their marketing that I want to be doing. Basically Good Story Company will evolve, but I want it to be a place where writers can get either resources or knowledge for absolutely free or that services that they can trust and really get something out of, get good value out of from people who I feel have received really wonderful training and have an inside line to the industry. That's what I'm hoping to cultivate on my team. Then giving them a way to really take leadership and own part of the business so that I can sort of step back and just lead rather than have my fingerprint on every single project. That's kind of the dream now just so I can maybe have a life. I don't know. I kind of don't want one. If I had free time and like used it to like, I don't know, like get hot stone massages. I don't know. I don't know.
Mindy: I hear you loud and clear. I never, I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not working. I'm not going to lie to you. When I do find myself with some time, I'm often like, okay, now what?
Mary: I don't know. I, I gotta tell you this story. So I take my laptop everywhere because when you own your own business, you're always working, especially if you have access to wifi or whatever. For me, I don't even need the internet. So there go all of my excuses. I can just, I can work on manuscripts from anywhere. And you know, writers are similar because all you need is that white, white, white, blank page. I went on vacation with my best friends and we flew in from separate cities because we live in separate cities. Unfortunately. We flew in for a weekend and she was like, no laptops. And I was like, yeah, sure. What's the worst that could happen? Basically? because of my work, I'm a freakishly fast reader. I brought with me, you know, two novels and a magazine that I bought at the airport and like halfway between Minneapolis and Vegas, which is where we were meeting, I just like ran out of material to keep me occupied and I just like remember staring out the window in this sort of like abject panic, like philosophical gap opened up like this void. And I was like, no, no. What is this? Me filling my void with work and achievement is a problem for my therapist. Not for us to solve necessarily, but I don't slow down, I don't stop. And when I ran out of reading materials somewhere over fly over country, I was like, no, no, this is, this is very uncomfortable.
Mindy: Yes, yes. And I agree with you. I have certainly flirted with the edges of workaholic ism. It is what it is and it's like I tell people all the time because I do so much, I mean obviously I'm a writer, but I also have a podcast and the blog and I also offer editorial services and then I actually have a pen name that I read under as well. And people ask me all the time, they're like, Oh my gosh, how do you do all of this? And I'm like, well, it's at the expense of my personal relationships,
Mary: Right? Just my self awareness, self care, personal relationship. But it's like at the end of the day, I'm not like addicted to shooting a nail gun into my hand. The workaholicsim - and every addict says this, so you have to take my justification with a grain of salt, - but I'm like, at least it's something good and productive in the world.
Mindy: That attitude of never stopping is a helpful one for people that want to be writers because you have to be able to take rejection and not just at the querying stage. It happens consistently to you throughout your life. In publishing, you will have rejection. You just have to take them on the chin and keep going. And that attitude of, okay, Mindy, pick yourself up. Let's keep going move, move, move. Now that I am returning more positive things from that mindset than I am negative, I'm like, okay. I mean, it was good training. It was bootcamp.
Mary: Yeah, no, I completely, I completely agree with you. And honestly, so I now I can say stuff like, well, in all my years working with writers, you know, and now, now that I'm a crusty old timer, I can tell you just watching writers fall into two main camps. They're the people who are precious about an idea or the amount of time spent on an idea or the exact execution of an idea. Those people don't tend to fare as well. They tend to break instead of bouncing when they hit an obstacle and they tend to burn out and not see the success that I think they were initially hoping to see when the industry sort of choose them up and spits them out a little bit. Not maliciously, but you gotta have a thick skin. And I think perseverance because the other half of writers that I tend to see that actually do succeed eventually.
Mary: Maybe not how they hoped, maybe not on their ideal timeframe, but the ones who do see eventually are the ones who, whether the obstacles they go through, they figure out a way to manage their emotions. Even when they do hit those obstacles and then they persevere. I mean there's this great Instagram quote that goes around, I've seen a couple of different versions of it, but it's basically like, "Don't cling to a mistake because you spent so much time making it." Some writers they will only ever have that one idea. They will only ever have that one manuscript and instead of actually revising it or making sure the idea works, they move commas around and that unfortunately is not a sustainable way to operate in today's market. And the writers that keep going, they pick themselves up. They have more than one idea. They are more willing and open minded about trying something else or trying something new or completely ripping their manuscript apart.
Mary: Those are the writers that end up, I think really, really triumphant on this, on this tough journey and so if there was one thing I could kind of impart on a lot of my clients who haven't made it yet, it would be to, to take the long view and maybe you do have a project right now that's not going to work out. Well, put it away. It doesn't have to be gone from your life forever. There are more ideas than just the one. That's I think what is going to build not only a better mindset but better writing habits. Things like writer's block. I don't believe in it. I refuse to participate and so many writers will let themselves be stopped. It's like you come to a scene that you just can't write today or you have no inspiration, well then leap frog over it and write the next thing. Or you're stuck on a project. Well, is there another project you could working on? And some people really don't do well leaping from stream to stream, but I think that kind of nimble approach is really a great asset for a lot of writers too, to at least try to have if they haven't already.
Mindy: I just did a school visit yesterday and I was focusing on my book, The Female of the Species, and I was telling them in like a writer's workshop. I wrote the first draft of that in 1999 I was 19 years old. It was published in 2016. That's the kind of stuff that you just kind of have to say to yourself, okay, what I had in 1999 was terrible. It was dreck. It was awful. It was the first book I'd ever written. It was the first time I'd sat down and written a book and therefore it was horrible. I knew the idea was good. I knew I wasn't a good enough writer yet to execute it. Probably 15 years later, my editor says, Hey, what else have you got in the pipe? And I float it to him and he's like, that sounds awesome. And now it's my bestselling book. But it's like I knew I wasn't able to execute that book yet. And so I set it aside and I wrote six other books, you know what I mean.
Mary: Yeah. Good for you. That idea when you put it in the drawer, I bet that was a really sad day. But then it came back.
Mindy: It was hard. It was under my bed for 15 years and that was where it belonged. It wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. And instead of getting disgusted and upset,
Mary: Maybe there were a couple of minutes when you were disgusted and upset.
Mindy: I might've been upset once or twice. Yeah. People, when I talk to them about my particular journey and the fact that I was querying for 10 years, I just see faces fall all the time. And I'm like, guys, you have to realize at the beginning of that 10 years, I was not the writer that I am now. Even understanding the industry, and I know people don't want to do that, but if you want to succeed, you have to. You're not just a writer up in your tower. You have to actually do your work.
Mary: You know what? I couldn't have said it better myself. One thing that I won't do for clients, and I could do this in my sleep and make so much money doing it, is I will not put together submission lists for people, for agents and publishers. I will not do it for them because people, you know, there are a lot of people who will trade money for time spent, right? They want to save time and you're like, please, I'll buy a list from you. You know everybody, you know it better than I do. And I categorically refuse to do it for people because I'm like, first of all, it's not my life that is going to be impacted by this decision. You know, I don't have as much skin in the game as you do. Second of all, I don't want to hear about it, if they get rejected and it was the list's problem, you know,? But the most important reason is because those people need to, this is such an important part of the process. The researching the agents, figuring out who's out there, figuring out what they represent, figuring out what the market is, figuring what the different agencies are and who within them might be a good fit and what those people are saying on Twitter and all of that like you could, you could get really granular. It is a lot of information, but that work is so crucial to your development as a writer and your development from somebody who wrote a manuscript to somebody who now wants to get out there in the world with their manuscript.
Mary: It's a mindset shift. I will not do that work. It may seem like busy work. It may seem overwhelming. I will not do that work for somebody else. It is homework for the writer and the writer only and I can't even tell you how many times I've had to say no, no. I will give you these resources. I will give you my best practices and how I recommend going about it. But no, this is your quicksand that you have to go struggle in for a little while because you're going to come out a different writer and you're going to come out with skills you didn't even know you needed. There are agents out there with big personalities, I happen to love but a writer, it rubs them the wrong way. So it's like I'm not you and I have no interest in being you. Now go and do the work.
Mindy: And that total immersion that is learning the industry and the the agencies and the agents is useful throughout the rest of your career. So if you have someone else do that for you, that'd be like being born when you were 10 years old and you didn't learn how to walk on your own.
Mary: You know, another thing nobody talks about is sometimes the agent you find is not going to be your agent forever or sometimes the publisher, your publisher forever. So you know there's a time to focus on the craft, but there's a time to pay attention and put your ear down on the ground and hear what the market is all about too. You know, I was just having another conversation with somebody this morning about marketing and how that's such a dirty word and it's a dirty connotation and writers don't really like this mix of commerce and art because they want to be in the creative cocoon and they don't want to think about the, the commerce, the business. Your book is a product, all that stuff. At some point you've got to figure out what the market is doing. If you hope to participate in it, that's really the end all, be all for me. At some point you're going to have to figure that out, that piece and learn to be okay with that piece.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you tell us where listeners can find, you can find Mary Kole editorial and Good Story Company and Crit Collective and all of these things that you are a part of. Why don't you let us know where they can find you online?
Mary: Well, I'm not going to waste their valuable time and rattle off everything. Good story Company.com is a great place to start because right on the homepage that'll say, this is who we are. You know, you can get links to Kid Lit to MaryKole.com, which is my editorial services. All sorts of other things like the podcast are listed on there. Many more things to come. I hope that you found this talk interesting. I kind of like dream crusher dot com right now. We gave a realistic portrayal of the industry rather than anything sugarcoated, but I had a great time dishing some reality with you. Thank you for having me on.