Institute Childrens Literature

Rx for Writers

Transcripts

"Nuts and Bolts for the New Nonfiction Writer" with Mel Boring

Thursday, January 20, 2000

MODERATOR is Kristi Holl, Web Editor for the Institute's web site. Kristi is author of 23 juvenile novels and l00 articles and has taught writing at the Institute of Children's Literature for l5 years.

Mel Boring is our guest speaker. Mel has published popular nonfiction with Random House, Walker, Dillon Press, Julian Messner, and NorthWord Press, as well as writing for top magazines like Cricket and Highlights. Mel knows how to sell nonfiction! Mel's latest book is Guinea Pig Scientists, about people who experimented on themselves when animals wouldn't do!

Names color coded in blue are audience members who had questions.

Interviews are scheduled for Thursday evenings: 8 Eastern, 7 Central, 6 Mountain, and 5 Pacific.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Good evening, and welcome everyone! I'm your moderator, Kristi Holl, and I'm happy to see you tonight. Due to complications, our scheduled guest Victoria Sherrow must postpone her interview until February l7. Tonight my faithful sub, Mel Boring, will speak on the topic "Nuts and Bolts for the New Nonfiction Writer." Nonfiction is the easiest way to break into publishing, and Mel is here tonight to tell you how to do it. Welcome back, Mel!

Mel Boring: Thank you, it's good to be back--in the cool this time!

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Thank you for coming back, Mel! First, can you give us an overview of your nonfiction publishing credits?

Mel Boring: Of my nine published books for children, eight of them are nonfiction. They include two Native American biographies, about Sealth and Wovoka. One was a book about clowns, and one about constructions.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: You once said that "nonfiction sells about ten times easier than fiction." Why is that?

Mel Boring: Because, historically, 90% of children's books used to be sold to schools and libraries. Teachers and librarians were always needing books for kids doing reports, so most of the books they bought were nonfiction. But my real feeling is that nonfiction smacks of "doing work," while fiction is "more for play." So nonfiction is more "useful."

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Is that statement (about nonfiction selling ten times easier) true for new writers too?

Mel Boring: Nonfiction sells ten times easier for all writers.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Is that true for books as well?

Mel Boring: Yes, it is. Because even though children's books are now sold more through bookstores than to schools/libraries, bookstore people are still being asked (by adults usually) "Do you have a book about snakes?" or some other subject their child is writing/reporting about in school.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: When did you first publish nonfiction?

Mel Boring: In 1968, with SEALTH: THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN INDIAN. It was for Dillon Press, who was doing an American Indian series. Before that I had published nonfiction magazine articles. Articles are the best bet for new writers, rather than books.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: What would be some good topics for beginning writers wanting to break into nonfiction?

Mel Boring: Animals, animals and animals! That is, animals, nature and science, because those are the subjects that most children of most ages are sure to be interested in. In "Follow the Thread" in CHILDREN'S WRITER GUIDE 2000 I was interested to read of a person who got to know that famous whale, and found out there was not yet a book about... can't remember the whale's name... but that writer wrote the first book about the whale.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: You've had good luck with nonfiction. Are there any tricks for winning cover and query letters you could share?

Mel Boring: Yes, "the sweetest are the shortest." Keep in mind that editors are very busy people, and aren't we all? But I talk about the "3 Second Rule." An editor will give your cover letter or query letter three seconds, first. If you can interest them in three seconds, they may give you three minutes; if you can interest them for three minutes, they will give you 30. That three seconds may eventually lead to a contract. So the first-most important thing is to "hook 'em" with your query or cover letter, just like you would "hook" kids at the opening of an article or book. The first sentence of your query, especially, must be a zinger!

Another "trick" is to keep the letter short, no more than one page though it could include an outline of your subject on another one page. Starting writers often ask about resumes and credits. If you have a stellar background in the subject you're writing about, then a one-page resume would be helpful. But if you have no stellar career, nor any credits, don't mention them, and don't even mention not mentioning them. Editors will know if you don't mention credits, you probably don't have any and the credits really don't matter--it's the subject, and your treatment of the subject.

Steve: To grab them in 3 seconds, do you always use something really shocking to start your queries?

Mel Boring: Yes, shocking sometimes and always gripping and "grabby." If I were writing about the infra red, for example, a subject that could be truly "Boring," even if some other writer wrote about it, I might try to "hook" an editor by opening with "Live bodies can be seen from high up in the air because they always send out heat, of course. And infra-red photos can photograph the heat of one live person from 30,000 feet in the air," or I would say some such to "grab 'em."

Seahorse: In the query, should you mention you've researched the subject x number of years?

Mel Boring: Yes, if you have done long-term research on the subject. If you had been the curator of a museum for dinosaurs for 25 years, for example, and you were querying about a book on some aspect of dinosaurs, tell the editor about it.

Seahorse: I researched a subject five years before submitting. Does that count?

Mel Boring: Yes, by all means, Seahorse, and what a workhorse you are! When mentioning that research to an editor, while keeping it short, I would also suggest that you give as much detail/focus about your research to interest the editor. For example, if you had been curator of a dinosaur museum, perhaps your specialty was the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the specific dinosaur you are writing about in an article or book.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Mel, can you share some *don'ts* when writing queries and cover letters?

Mel Boring: Yes, don't go over one page, first and foremost. Secondly, don't ask an editor a question like, "Did you know that mice and rats continually grow their teeth throughout life?" because editors will likely know that, and it would likely offend them. Also, don't overpromise.

DebO: Most magazines only accept queries for non-fiction. How can a new writer break in when they don't have a lot of clips or a resume to send with the query?

Mel Boring: DebO, you break in the same way as a writer like me continues, by writing excellently about well chosen topics. And if the subject is a "gripper" and your writing "grabby," credits and clips really don't matter.

Mooska: If a writer has credits in a certain genre but queries about writing for another genre, should he list the credits?

Mel Boring: Yes, as long as they are writing credits, Mooska, they are very valid for writing in general.

Ducky: When listing credits, should you just say "I have had four books published" or how specific should you be?

Mel Boring: I think if your credits are really impressive, yes, list them all, or most of them. But I think that, to an editor, no credits at all isn't as dismal as we as writers might think. Remember, the editor is looking for a smashing nonfiction article or book. If the idea is impressive, who needs credits and clips? If the first manuscript of the first Harry Potter book had come to the first editor without credits or clips, the editor might get so engrossed in reading about Harry that she/he never even thought about credits. The manuscript was that author's "credit."

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: What about outlines with queries? How long should they be and what should they cover? Is there a special format?

Mel Boring: Again, one page for the outline, only. They should cover the salient points about the subject and it can be a sentence outline, rather than the traditional "Roman Outline" we learned in high school. I do sentence outlines most of the time. Instead of Roman numerals I may just list 1., 2., 3. and so on, with the 1. being the "Opening Grabber" I will use in the article, and the 2. being what I will bridge from my opening with, and then a sentence about each salient point of the article.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: How do you write a nonfiction book outline to go with a query? (Specific nuts and bolts)

Mel Boring: In the case of my CLOWNS: THE FUN MAKERS, I used the "Roman Numeral" style for the outline. And each Roman Numeral of the outline covered a different kind of clowns. For example, one was animal clowns, another women clowns, and so on. Then in the writing of the book, each of those Roman Numerals suggested the subtopic for a chapter, although not every Roman Numeral on the original outline turned into a book chapter. But animal clowns, for instance, is a natural for children. Then I also have a "zinger" of an ending, or OUTRO, as I call it, so that the outine (and the book) doesn't just kind of "run out of gas" at the end.

Marv: I work hard on my manuscripts to get them just right. I proofread them with a fine tooth comb, yet, when they come back from the editor, I find punctuation errors that I missed. Any suggestions on how to avoid this aggravation?

Mel Boring: One suggestion, Marv, is to let a friend--and I do mean friend--with good skills proofread your manuscript, perhaps another writer. Because "All of us is smarter than any of us," and what you don't catch in your proofreading, another reader will catch, and vice-versa. For my CLOWNS book, my "final proofreader" was my son Jeremy, age 12 at the time. In the second edition of that book, as he read it, he came running into my office and said, "Dad, Dad, you made a mistake on page 57. You said, 'Clowns do funny trUcks." That manuscript had been proofread by me and who knows how many copyeditors at Julian Messner Publishers, but in all that time, we hadn't caught that error. So let your friends help.

Marv: How do you feel about a true life experience being treated as non-fiction, rather than fiction which most publishers feel it is?

Mel Boring: I'm not sure that most publishers would prefer every true-life experience be treated as fiction, Marv. I suppose if it's a true-life experience that would be too embarrassing to the people who lived it, they might consider making it fiction. It would depend on the experience.

writerabc: Have you written any nonfiction in the true story format?

Mel Boring: Writerabc, I haven't yet. But if I were writing about, say, SEALTH, the namesake of Seattle, WA today, instead of back in 1968, I might write it in "true story format." That is, I might add dialogue that I thought fit the times Sealth lived in, when there was no record of any exact dialogue he spoke, except for a few quotes.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Let's talk about current market conditions for a bit . . . According to census figures, the number of people under age 5 in the US is close to 20 million. This is a huge number of preschoolers ready for nonfiction board books and slick magazines. What are some trends in PreK (pre-kindergarten) nonfiction?

Mel Boring: Animals and nature, as I said, are interesting general topics for the PreK's. And it's also helpful to look at things and experiences very common, usual and ordinary to us, but which are fresh and new to a child younger than five. For example, I think of a toothbrush off the top of my head. Our children were, I think, about three, when they started using a toothbrush. To us adults, a toothbrush is boring, but to a child, it is as fresh and new as if the toothbrush had just been invented. In a PreK book about toothbrushes, for instance, I might lightly trace the history of the toothbrush, with early Indians who brushed their teeth with the twigs of birch trees, for example.

Or the book might simply be about toothBRUSHING itself--though I wouldn't write a "health textbook" for that age (or any age). A nonfiction book about toothbrushing might show different kinds of toothbrushes, long, short, red, pink, and so on or perhaps I'd want to write a whimsical picture book about what if dogs and cats and pigs (do chickens have teeth?) used toothbrushes. So that general topic of teethbrushing could have many different foci (is that the plural of focus?), and even yield many different books.

Steve: Are publishers actually looking for more nonfiction for this huge age group?

Mel Boring: Yes, for sure, Steve. One publisher, Viking, has 25% of their total books published being for the PreK age range. And of course, the age zero to five years old covers "many different worlds," because a child of two, for example, lives in a different world than a 5'er.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Where can our viewers find out what preK publishers are looking for, publishers like Cartwheel Books (Scholastic) and Barefoot Books?

Mel Boring: In the two articles I mentioned in CHILDREN'S WRITER GUIDE TO 2000 there are the two articles by Broerman and Anderson which both cover what various publishers want. Plus, many publishers, like Barefoot Books, have Internet sites where you can look at their list of published books, to see what they are interested in. Each separate publisher, like each separate book, has a certain narrowed focus, clearly set out in their books.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Can you talk about some specific magazines who now publish a large percentage of nonfiction?

Mel Boring: RANGER RICK, for one, is the quintessential animal magazine and has a large percentage of nonfiction. I was surprised to see that CRICKET Magazine has mostly fiction, because I've always thought they had outstanding nonfiction articles. I once did an actual survey of all the (400 at the time) children's magazines in the CHILDREN'S MAGAZINE MARKET, an annual listing. I read the statistics of how many fiction pieces and how many nonfiction the magazines used each month. This first clued me in to the fact that (it turned out exactly) 90% of all the published pieces were nonfiction. What that means is if you are writing and trying to sell FICTION, you're going to face a marketplace that has perhaps a hundred stories to choose from besides yours. If you write a NONFICTION article, however, there may be only ten other articles you're competing with at any particular magazine.

I know this sounds like, "Yeah, right, Mel," but it's true. The thing to do today if you want to get published fastest in the children's marketplace is to write a NONFICTION ARTICLE. And of course, while your nonfiction is selling like hotcakes, you can work on your fiction to make it as competitive as possible. The fact is, writers, there is simply ten times as much fiction as nonfiction submitted, and you can sell most easily in the genre where there's the most need, nonfiction. With books, generally the same is true. This is the fact: Most EDITORS need mostly NONFICTION. Most WRITERS write mostly FICTION.

Sheila: How would you write an outline for a PreK nonfiction book? I am very new at writing so I hope that's not a stupid question.

Mel Boring: I would (and NO question is a stupid one, by the way) keep the outline even simpler than, say, the outline for a book for the 8-12's because the essence of nonfiction for the PreK's is simplicity. I would first write a "lead," I'll call it. Say I wanted to write about toothbrushes, the object, for, say, four-year-olds specifically. My lead might be, "How big would an elephant's toothbrush need to be?" That, I'd hope, would catch the attention of an editor (who would wonder where you're going with it), as it would catch the attention of a child. I would "shuck it down" into, say, five subtopics. The first subtopic might be, Who was the first person to brush their teeth? And I would work to get it even simpler than that, since the PreK's don't have that long a sense of history. Another subtopic in the body of the outline might be, What were the first toothbrushes made of? Or what did your grandpa's toothbrush look like? That would interest children not only because they're perhaps first using a toothbruth, but to think that Grandpa used to use one too, when he was a kid. Then the book might include info about false teeth--maybe.

But as I've been "thinking out loud here," you can probably see the narrowing and refining process going on in my thinking, about what to include, what not to, what's too complicated and what's simple enough. Think of writing nonfiction this way. Looking at ALL the topics you could write about in nonfiction, first pick out one broad topic, say dinosaurs. Then looking only at dinosaurs--which you've narrowed it down to--look at one kind of dinosaur, say the TRex. Then, what if you narrowed that down to the TRex's teeth? (I seem to be doing big on teeth tonight!) But today's nonfiction books, in contrast to those of 30-40 years ago are very specialized. I recall my friend Leslie Dendy writing an article for RANGER RICK about "Sticky Lickers and Other..." the article was about animal TONGUES only--that was her narrowed FOCUS. When you focus a nonfiction subject, it's like, first, looking at things withOUT your glasses (if you wear glasses), all blurry and foggy. But when you put your glasses on, suddenly things become clear and focused. That is the difference between a blurry, generalized article or book about dinosaurs, and a narrowly focused, specialized article or book about "The TRex's Toes."

Marv: I have a book that is on the review table with Goodyear Books. It is an abc book about an apple farm. This is my first book to be "on the review table." Do I run a good chance of having it published if it has gotten this far?

Mel Boring: Yes, you do, Marv. Because that means an editor has "gone to bat" for you, to get it that far, so that other editors and the sales force and a broader range of the publisher's people are considering it. Of course, it could still not make it. But even if not, you know that book of ABC's about an apple farm has the stuff to sell to another publisher, if Goodyear doesn't buy it. CONGRATULATIONS, Friend!

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: There are many nonfiction series. Do beginning writers have any chance of joining an existing series or selling their own?

Mel Boring: Yes, probably a better chance in joining the existing series because that series will have a format and precedents set. For example, I know of a series of biographies, in which the publisher wants the first chapter to be about a turning point in the life of the person being biographed. That means when you research, say, Bill Gates for that biographical series you would look for the turning point in his life. So some of the writing would be "cut and dried." There would just be some decisions made already for you, such as what your first chapter is going to be about, in that case. If you were just writing on your own, there would be no "signposts" to guide you in this way.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Do you recommend multiple submissions?

Mel Boring: Not at first because many editors/publishers don't like them. But when you have established a track record, I would multiple submit. My "track record" is only nine books; but I feel that gives me something of an advantage, so I'll multiple-submit now, EXCEPT to people I've come to work with and know, such as Kent Brown at HIGHLIGHTS and an editor at CRICKET I've worked with some, Debbie Vetter. But to editors I don't know, I'll multiply-submit.

My thinking is this, that if you were selling cars, would you let one driver take one of the cars for an undetermined length of time? Not. And I don't feel I want to have a book manuscript out exclusively for what could be years before it's rejected. But if I've worked with an editor (and some of them DO become friends) then I won't multiple-submit on them. Or if I do, I'll let them know I'm doing it. The main exception for the one-submit-at-a-time is if you're writing about a "timed" topic. Some years ago, I wrote an article about the Statue of Liberty for the year of its centennial, so I multiply-submitted. And I did in that case tell the editors that I was doing it, and why. And they'll understand that.

Steve: Are multiple submissions and simultaneous submissions the same thing?

Mel Boring: Yes, they are.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: How long should a writer wait to hear from a publisher? And should he write, phone, e-mail?

Mel Boring: My "rule of thumb" is to wait two months on a magazine piece, then send the publisher a self-addressed postcard with a prewritten message on the back: "We received your_______ about ______ (date)," then a line for the specific person's signature. If that doesn't get results, I will write a stronger letter. Then phone as a third step. I get the feeling so far that few editors like to work by e-mail, because it can get quite "rushy." But I might resort to that some time. Of course if you multiply-submit, you won't have as much problem about hearing back.

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: I'm sorry to have to break in, but we're out of time. Thank you again, Mel, for coming on short notice and sharing your expertise about breaking into the nonfiction field. I know our viewers have appreciated the information!

Mel Boring: I have really appreciated being here again, and thank YOU all!

MODERATOR Kristi Holl: Come back next week and we'll have another "Open Forum." "Open Forums" are where your Web Editor, Kristi Holl, fields your questions on any subject. I've published over 100 magazine articles and stories, as well as 23 books for the juvenile market. I'm a former student who has combined teaching for fifteen years and raising six children with her writing, and I welcome your questions on time management, getting started, writer's block, marketing, or anything else you'd like to discuss. Bring your QUESTIONS and OPINIONS to this moderated open forum next Thursday night. Good night!

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