 There we go. So, hi, welcome everyone to New Year, New Day in Publishing with literary agent, Laurie McLean. This event is produced in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference, of whom Laurie is a director. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And we work very closely with the Writers Conference to provide learning experiences for writers because the last thing librarians want to read is bad writing. So, that's why we partner well together. And I'm assisted today by my colleague Rick Holman, who you can't see, but trust me, he's there. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library. The oldest designed to serve the public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now, due to the pandemic, all of our activities are virtual, but we will be reopening soon. More details about that are on our website. I encourage you to become a member with us. It is only $120 a year. And with that, you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, our speaker today is Lori McLean, who spent 20 years as the CEO of a multi-million dollar marketing agency and eight years as an agent at Larsen Pomada Literary Agents before co-founding her own agency Fuse Literary in 2013. With her business partner, Gordon Warnock. At Fuse Literary, Lori specializes in middle grade, young adults and adult genre fiction, including romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, thrillers, all the fun stuff. All the pleasures of the pandemic, right, Taryn? Exactly. And as I said, she is the director of the director of the San Francisco Writers Conference. So I'm gonna put her social media tags in the chat space. And the way it's gonna work today is Lori is going to present her material and then we'll take questions. I'd love it if you would post these in the chat space as opposed to the Q&A space, just because it's easier for everyone to engage surrounding your question. But we will make every effort to pose it directly to Lori if that is what is clear from your question. So thank you very much for turning out this morning and thank you Lori also for coming to share your knowledge. Well, thank you, Taryn too. And thanks everybody for getting up early on a beautiful Saturday. I know as soon as I'm done, you're all gonna speed out of your houses and enjoy this incredible day. I mean, even in, I live in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco, welcome to my home office. See, you get a peek at where all the business is done but I'm sure you're all gonna jump out there. I mean, it's gonna be 70 on the coast. So I expect traffic to be heavy but I don't care, I'm only going out to my back deck and enjoy the sun, maybe read a book. I did wanna start with one exciting announcement. I mean, it is exciting that Mechanics is opening up again in person and I'll certainly, I mean, if there was a reason to go to San Francisco, that's probably it at this point but we have committed to do the San Francisco Writers Conference in person next February 17th through 20th. So yay, I know you all probably missed it a lot when it didn't happen last month. I know I missed it much more than I thought I would. I was kind of excited that, wow, after 17 or 16 years of doing it, I actually get to spend Valentine's Day with my husband. This is great, but throughout that entire weekend I was going, you know, at this time, I'd be doing dot, dot, dot, you know, my husband finally after like the 18th sign said, yeah, yeah, I know you'd be at the party, the gala on Saturday night drinking a writer's block cocktail, okay, got it. I'm like, ooh, I guess I've been saying that a lot. Anyway, registration is open. Go to the website sfwriters.org. The price right now is 695. It will stay that way till August. We usually raise it in the summertime, but we're gonna leave it there for a while. And I welcome you all to come. Now let's see, I'm gonna share my screen and we'll talk to you about new year, new day in publishing because it really is. You guys, publishing in 2020 was, as all of us were, was very discombobulated. Didn't know what was gonna happen. Stop buying books from agents. I mean, I sold more books in January of this year than I did the entire last year, 2020, so I sold more in January of 2021 than the whole previous year, which is insane. But let's look at the reasons why first. So take a little trip back to 2020. I know none of you want to. I guess you can stick your fingers in your ear and look away, but let's talk about the changes that happened in 2020. As we all know, everything came to a screeching halt. Publishing was scared. Will anyone buy books? Is everyone just gonna binge watch Netflix and Disney Plus and all the myriad other ones that are coming online? And if they do buy books, how are they gonna buy them? Are they going to buy print? Are they going to buy e-books? Are they gonna buy everything from Amazon? Sneak peek, yes. But how are they gonna do that? And then they panicked. They pushed all the bestseller books that were due in 2020 off to either late 2020 or 2021. And then they pushed them further off and even further off. I mean, some of my clients, it's been a year and three months. I think that's the longest time that they pushed it off. And they started buying less and less new books. Then something really weird happened. They took a deep breath. They looked at the sales numbers and they were shocked because more books were selling than at any time in the past decade. Not only that, their costs, their overhead was cut in by like 40, 50% because everybody was working from home. So they didn't have any of the costs of keeping their building up and going. I mean, the poor security guards, I'm sure they got laid off. A lot of people got laid off. Janitors and stuff, you can just shut down the buildings. And most of these big five publishers were in big buildings, high-rises in New York. So they saw their overhead really collapse and that was a good thing for them financially. They saw book sales go through the roof and that was a good thing for them financially. And it will be interesting to see how that affects publishing moving forward. But let's go back to 2020 again. They developed a plan. They pivoted to social media promotions and online book selling. They started filling the production pipeline with books again, I'd say mid-year last year and they figured out how their staff could work effectively remotely from home and publishing thrived. In fact, 2020 was their most profitable year in decades upon decades upon decades. So that was a surprise. And of course, publishing operates in such a slim margin anyway, they tried to figure out, well, what are we gonna do with this extra money that we hadn't budgeted for? What's next? What's gonna happen in 2021? So why did book sales skyrocket? Well, they were driven by wave after wave of content need due to the pandemic. I mean, kids were getting remote learning, right? They needed educational or scholastic plus entertainment books because maybe they'd been looking at that computer for four hours doing their school work and then maybe they wanted to play games but maybe they also wanted to read books. You had a whole plethora of entertainment options for kids but also parents bought a lot of school books. And adults needed nonfiction and fiction titles to understand the evolving situation that was nonfiction. In fact, more nonfiction political books sold in 2020 than anything else. But they also needed fiction to escape and stay sane. You know, the best way to escape if you're locked up in your house is a book. Obama's promised land memoir sales were huge. It was the best selling book, even though it came out after the election but it was the best selling book in 2020. And backlist titles like Where the Craw Dad Sing by Delia Owens, that was huge sales. So she got another huge bump from that. Two big franchises, Twilight and the Hunger Games published new titles. So all these things played into the pent up demand to occupy ourselves when we couldn't go anywhere. And publishing will continue to grow. So let's go into 2021 now. All these statistics are from the NPD group which is BookScan. And BookScan is kind of the official way to calculate taking a strategic sample of sales. They extrapolate how many books were sold in a year. 751 million print books were sold in 2020 and 191 million e-books were sold in 2020. That's an 8% growth in sales over 2019. And this is in an industry whose, if they get 1% profit, they're lucky. So I'm not exaggerating when I say that is a banner year for publishing. Backlist titles grew by 4% with 14 million more backlist titles sold compared to the previous year. In 2004, there were 51% of the books sold were backlist. And in 2020, that rose up to 67%. So you could see that, what did they say, high tide floats all boats. That was certainly true for backlist titles. Trade paperbacks saw the highest gains up by 36 million units last year. And e-books grew by 12.6% sent to 19 million units, which is actually good. If you look at the top two lines of 750 million and the 191 million, that is a bigger percentage of e-books than we've had in any year as well. And then if we thought that was good, holiday sales were up 12% over 2019, which was also a really big year for holiday sales. Digital audio sales were up 17%. Again, these numbers are phenomenal for one year. And the reason why I say it's gonna continue to grow is that in the first month of 2021, book sales were up 22% year to date. Now, I don't expect it to continue at that rate, but 2021, you know, we're already, what, end of March and things haven't really changed all that much. People are still spending most of their time at home, working from home, a few of them are going back in, but offices haven't reopened. I mean, people who are working in our essential services, yeah, they're still overwhelmed. And I'm sure they all have PTSD and I hope the government supports them with a lot of help, psychological help, they're gonna need it. But, you know, first month of 2021 is looking good for the rest of the year. Let's talk about specific parts of the industry because I know all of you write different things. So nonfiction books, book sales outpaced fiction. This is very topsy-turvy. The increased sales of nonfiction benefited from a lot of the social justice movements in the U.S. and abroad. You saw a lot of those kind of books explaining what it was to be black living in a white world or a woman living in a man's world and other social justice movements. DIY nonfiction sales skyrocketed because people were forced to stay in their home in that dripping sink or that paint job that never got finished or the deck that's falling in, you know. All of a sudden those things were front and center and you couldn't ignore them anymore. So a lot of people bought DIY, do it yourself, nonfiction books, they could fix those things themselves. Cookbook sales also soared. I mean, it's amazing how many people don't know how to cook, they just went out to restaurants every night or ordered in. So as they decided they wanted to learn how to cook, they either bought boxes like Hello Fresh that were delivered to them or they bought cookbooks or joined services online. But as more and more of them ate at home, I think that's gonna continue. I think cookbook sales will have a decent growth pattern moving forward into 2021. And of course, for obvious reasons, diet book sales also went up. I can tell you, I got the pandemic 10 for sure that I'm trying to lose, but my body's not working with me here. Finally, crafts and hobby books also saw big sales and you can imagine if you ever wanted to take up knitting again or learn how to crochet or play chess and you couldn't go to mechanics, you know. But now you can. So use all those skills you learned during the pandemic and become a force in the chess room. The losers were books on religion, health and fitness, reference business and travel. But all that means is look for them to grow in 2021. The other area that grew amazingly was comics and graphic novels. You had kids who were reluctant readers perhaps, but man, they love comics and they love superheroes and they would even try a graphic novel if it was about something they were interested in and manga sales skyrocketed as both children and adults discovered their appeal. Sales rose from 14 million to 30 million, so more than doubled in one year. Popular categories were social themes, fantasy, activity books, study aids to some degree and language arts. But adult comic and graphic novels grew 3.7%. Kid comics rose 0.5%. YA titles grew 0.2%. Everyone wanted to be entertained. And yeah, you can read books. They're an investment of time. Whereas a comic, you can blaze through that and have a few chuckles. So comics and graphic novels, what I've seen as an agent is more and more publishers are buying them too. And for example, Penguin Random House just took over distribution in bookstores from, gosh, I think it was DC Comics. It was mainly going through comic bookstores. And now they're once again going into regular bookstores as they open. Online book sales went ballistic. That's probably something you all experience and you all know. And this looks to be a permanent trend for 2021 and beyond. It's comfortable. Sometimes it's less expensive. You can find everything online and you get it delivered to your home so you don't even have to get dressed and go out to shop. I'm not really an introvert, but that even appeals to me. In-store sales of books were down only 2% in 2020 but they are declining at a more rapid rate so far in 2021. So I like to think of it as an ecosystem. Sure, buy some stuff from Amazon. It's very convenient and it's affordable. But also support local bookstores, support local business, because if they go away, we are really screwed. I don't wanna be at the hand of a monopoly. So just included in the ecosystem, I'm not saying don't ever buy from Amazon again. I think that's foolish, but do buy from, you know, do spread your money around. Online book sales rose 43% so almost doubled and Amazon was already a huge force in the market. But online sales of everything are now firmly entrenched in people's routines. I mean, people who were afraid to buy online, they were forced to and they saw how easy it was and you know, I don't know. I feel like there's no privacy left anywhere online anyway these days. So protect yourself as much as you can and just it's part of the society we live in now. But here's one of my predictions for 2021 is I believe indie bookstores can rebound. Barnes & Noble might not make it, at least not with the huge store footprints or mall footprints that they have. They're trying to write that ship, but I don't know if James Daunt is gonna be able to do it. He's the guy, British guy who took over Barnes & Noble and we'll see. He hasn't done too much to impress me yet, but it's only been three months so I'm ready to give him more time. But small indie bookstores really understand the importance of community. So they will survive if not exactly thrive. A couple of weeks ago I was on a panel talking about predictions for 2021 and one of the guys in the panel said, well, you must be talking to other bookstores than I am because every bookstore I talk to just bemoans the fact that they are just scraping by on the bottom that sales have dropped off and they're not being able to keep their staffs and blah, blah, blah. And so when I say they understand the importance of community and they will survive, they're not gonna thrive. And this is where we all come in because if we do buy books from them either occasionally or exclusively we're gonna help them through this period of adjustment because 2021 really is gonna be an adjustment as people start to get vaccinated and venture out more and feel comfortable going into stores and restaurants and bars and other retail establishments. I hope bookstores are one of them but rather than buy everything from Amazon, visit your locals too. Indie bookstores are absolutely rocking drive by distribution and delivery. So take advantage of those services that helps them employ people. Readers understand the value of local indie bookstores. So the hope is that they'll support the entire ecosystem online and offline moving forward, as I've said four times already today. New companies like bookshop.org also couple of the ease and value of online shopping with financial support for brick and mortar stores. And if you don't know about bookshop.org go ahead and take a look. A lot of organizations, San Francisco Writers Conference for example, has a page of books by all of our presenters from Writing for Change last September. Oh, and Writing for Change is definitely going to be online every September. We had, we tripled in the amount of people that we could reach as you might expect. We grew from a one day conference held in San Francisco to a week long inspiration conversation part of it and also then a two day writing conference. And it was all online on Crowdcast. And it was so successful. We're gonna keep that going moving forward. But bookshop.org was our bookstore because right there while you were listening to somebody you could click on bookshop.org right from Crowdcast and actually buy the books. So it worked out. It was so seamless. It was wonderful. Okay. I know a lot of you are indie authors and I wanted to make sure I got the news out to you. Get ready for growth. Audio books could be huge for indies if they can move beyond Amazon's ACX platform which unfortunately ACX doesn't do a lot of marketing unless you already sell a ton of books. And those are really best sellers in print and ebook will become the best sellers in audiobook but audiobook sales have gone through the roof and there's some new things going on alternate publishing formats I guess I'd call them and they are starting to emerge where they are seamlessly integrating ebooks and audiobooks. So say you're reading an ebook and then you need to commute or you need to take your kids to school or you wanna go shopping or whatever then automatically the audiobook can start to talk to you, read the book to you. So Serial Box is just one of them. They're gonna be changing their name to Realm but I think for now if you went to serialbox.com you'd see what's going on. A lot of celebrities have invested in these startups and I don't know, to me as a former technologist this is very exciting because I've always liked the idea of nonlinear storytelling or something that's so seamless it doesn't matter if you're reading a print book reading an ebook, listening to an audiobook participating in some kind of interactive story if those could be seamless I think more people would give it a shot. So look at Serial Box, Radish, Crazy Maple Studio and Tapas Media. Crazy Maple Studio does more genre fiction, romance you're just starting to get into mysteries and thrillers and Tapas Media, they do a lot of novels but they also do where they make most of their money I think is in their graphic novels and comics. Radish, gosh, you know that's probably the one I know the least about I haven't sold anything to them but I believe they're mostly fiction and Serial Box is cool. They hired a bunch of senior editors who got laid off because they were a high expense for publishers and they all went to Serial Box and a whole bunch of celebrities invested in it and they do serialized fiction so you buy it by the episode but if you wanna buy the whole book it's always 9.99 and that's ebook and audiobook so it's a cool model, I like it. I hope it succeeds. As e-reader sales skyrocketed, digital content also soared if KDP titles can be marketed effectively sales will increase even on backlist titles and remember indie authors with your backlist titles don't just let them languish you can combine them together into a super mega box or something and sell it like that and adjust the price and have a different cover and you can try all kinds of things like that because you own all those rights and people are reading ebooks a lot more than they have in the past. Digital means mutable. Wow, I guess I just said this. The author has more control, try new covers, new pricing, sales, repackage series or bundles works from short stories to epics can be marketed together. Get your book included in an anthology of similar books from other authors and change your metadata over time so it continues to be relevant and I'm not talking about the metadata of your title your ISBN number, things like that. I'm talking about metadata like keywords. If something happens that brings one of my colleagues or my colleagues this morning sent me a pitch that she's doing on a romance that one of the characters is a flight attendant. And I said, well, there's a lot of stuff that's been happening in airlines recently. Make sure that metadata reflects those things and also make sure that the romance that's going on I would think the airlines would want to make that person an influencer. So make sure you use some of this terminology in this book when you're pitching it. So that's what I mean by mutable metadata. Make sure that your keywords you should be doing this all the time for holidays if they apply or current events or just events in general or if society has a word that is apropos to what your book's about you should be changing those keywords. And what that means is keywords is how are people looking for what your book also says. So if somebody in that example I just gave you if somebody said airlines, maybe that would come up if this author had put airlines as one of her keywords. Okay. Remote learning and book growth. Remote learning has changed the way kids relate with online reading. Just as Apple rose to dominance in the 1980s and 90s by seeding schools with Apple products today's kids are now perfectly comfortable with reading digital books and that will continue into adulthood. I was waiting for this kind of watershed moment when kids would change the way that they interact. I thought it actually was gonna be with picture books when it changed from mom or dad or grandma or whoever holding the child so that the child could feel the heartbeat and interacting with the child and reading that picture book when that flip to somebody doing it with an iPad so they could show the animations or the sounds or whatever it was. That's when I thought a generation of kids would grow up issuing print books for the extras that you would get in eBooks. But instead it happened during the pandemic. I saw this really cute meme the other day of a mother walking with her toddler down a city street and the toddler was stopping at electrical boxes or any kind of thing within reach touching it and then wiping her hands. And I thought, oh my God, these kids, you know they picked it up, they're running with it. Also watch for innovation in the merging of storytelling, video games, reading, listening, music and more as these digital natives grow up because I don't think they're gonna go back and then the way they teach their kids eventually 20 years down the road is gonna incorporate a lot of this as well. I'm personally excited about non-linear storytelling and create your own adventure books. I don't think we're there yet but I got excited about this in 2009 and now I'm excited about it again 10 years later. So we'll see, takes a long time to make something popular but let's see what happens. Also the flip side of that is virtual book promotion is here to stay. You know, as a former business person not in the publishing industry I always thought that the economics of sending an author on a multi-city book tour never made any sense except for the super duper best sellers. And also with the coming of internet access back in the aughts, fans can find their authors easily online. And so that whole disintermediation like you had to wait until they came to your town or you'd have to drive many hours to go to a big enough city to see your favorite author. You know, that's been reduced in demand. Fans are less motivated to come out to experience an author signing. I'm sure many of you have done an author signing and only had three or four people show up and it's really heartbreaking because you get so up for it and then it's like, oh, three people, great. Well, I'll still do it, but man, that's too bad. Plus many bookstores are still closed. So, you know, there's not much you can do about that. Fans can interact with authors online via social media and Zoom. One way this is hugely evident is school visits. So if you're a kid lit author, pivoting to virtual visits is necessary. It's cheaper, it's easier. And I mean, teachers love it because it doesn't cost them anything except for the fee for the author which in a lot of cases has been reduced because they don't have to travel. So kids really like it too. Kids are used to Zoom. I mean, like I said, I just think that's gonna be incorporated into learning moving forward and it's gonna change how people interact with reading devices, whether it's a print book or a Kindle. Virtual promotion is here to stay and will accelerate as new methods are tried and either discarded or adopted. So think outside of the box on your promotion. Just make sure that the box is your screen because that's how it's gonna happen. The other interesting thing, and I definitely stole this from BookScan. So props to them, but they came up with the term of micro communities. And 2020 was the year of consolidation, but I think 2021 is gonna be the year of innovation. We've adapted our routines and our processes in order to survive COVID-19 and working at home. But now I feel like everyone's really getting ready to innovate, to thrive. So it's like, yeah, we survived it all kind of. We're ready now, we're ready now to think outside the box. And that doesn't mean going back to normal. That means there were some things about working at home I liked. Maybe I can keep those and innovate in other ways. So micro communities is one of those things that was born out of 2020. They are groups focused on a single voice or area of interest. Think mommy bloggers or lifestyle influencers, online book clubs, fashionista Instagrammers or TikTokers. In fact, there's now a thing called BookTalk for TikTok people who like books. So books targeted to this demographic will accelerate their growth, the growth of micro communities. So think about that when you're thinking about how to market yourself and your books, becoming an influencer or even a voice in these micro communities. It's a good way to sell books. You might be a member of several micro communities that were formed because you couldn't get together in real life. So they were created online. Think about how you would market to those micro communities. It doesn't have to be a big bullhorn approach by my book about something that's unrelated. But because they know you and like you because you've been interacting in these micro communities over the past year and maybe even longer. Think of a way that wouldn't be intrusive but would allow them to know that you've got a book and if they like you, they'll probably buy your book. Libraries and eBooks, I love story. Libraries have rocked eBook lending. It's the most popular lending in libraries today for obvious reasons. I have a few clients who are librarians and they're like, yeah, lending out print books has gone the way of the dinosaur. Yes, it will come back as libraries reopen but lending online, eBooks for a certain period of time, people are going nuts over it. Publishers need to reevaluate the pricing model for libraries though because they are gouging libraries. And Amazon even is determining what their pricing model for eBook lending to libraries is gonna look like. Right now they're discussing it. And I think if they develop a structure that succeeds it will definitely influence traditional publishers. How traditional publishers are doing it is they are charging libraries per a certain amount of lending like 250 lens and then you've gotta buy the book again. Whereas if they just bought a print book that can be lent forever. So and the eBook pricing model is way out of whack for libraries, it's so much more expensive and you would think it would be less expensive because there's not a printing, binding paper all of that cost shipping. My prediction is this, you'll see Amazon imprints and KDP eBooks in library catalog by next Christmas, if not sooner. I bet a lot of you didn't even know that Amazon does not license your self-published KDP book to libraries. Maybe you did, smash words licenses them to libraries and have done for years, but Amazon did not and they're looking at that now. So whatever they come up with because they're getting a lot of pressure to keep it affordable. I think that's gonna influence what other traditional publishers do and hopefully libraries will get a break because man, just like indie bookstores they've had a hard row to hold this past year. Publishing diaspora will continue. What is that you say? Well, more publishing workers have fled New York during the pandemic than ever before. First of all, it wasn't safe. If you remember back to the first half of 2020 New York spiked hard and people were dying in massive numbers. So people fled because they were going to live at their parents' home or they knew that they could get a house up in Westchester or out of Long Island or even in Pennsylvania or someplace else in upstate New York that for the price of what they were paying for their one bedroom apartment in Manhattan, they could buy a house. So it was also not affordable in New York and you couldn't find a lot of things. So a lot of publishing workers fled New York and they still are gone. And I just wonder how many of these people who now live in a nice house in Rhineback are gonna wanna move back to that one bedroom apartment that they can even find it. My prediction, many will not return once the pandemic's over. Now think about how that's gonna impact commercial real estate in Manhattan. All the big huge high rises that publishers have rented out floors to other companies over the past, you know, five, 10 years. And yet, will they be able to? Do they need to? Do they wanna keep those huge edifices to their grandeur? I don't know. I mean, that's not gonna happen in 2021 but take a look at that over the next 10 years. Also Zoom meetings, sorry, skip one, working remotely will become the new publishing norm, hopefully. You know, as far as the San Francisco Writer's conference is concerned, just one aspect is a lot of agents have been moving back home or back to where they grew up. So in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have agents that work for large agencies in New York who now live locally, so we can get them in person and that's a good thing. Zoom meetings will replace in-person meetings. Publishing workers will come to New York, maybe monthly for in-person meetings. But I don't know, anybody who worked in an office and this past year has shown us that when you work in an office, you waste a lot of time in meetings, going out to lunch, everything else. I mean, the hardest thing for me, and I've been working at home in a home office for almost two decades now, the hardest thing is to turn off work and take a lunch and get up and walk around. I'll look up at the clock and am amazed that four hours has gone by, but, and that wasn't watching YouTube videos or being on Facebook, it was actually working. But I think there's a lot of advantages to working at home, you know, cutting out the commute, just that. And so eventually, I truly believe that New York will be the center of publishing a name only, even though they'll never admit it, but I think that's what you're gonna see. Oh, and did I mention diversity? That probably should have been number one. Diversity in publishing, both in author selection and in the publishing employees themselves is a huge, huge, huge, cannot stress enough, huge social justice movement that I don't believe is gonna go away anytime soon. In fact, it's accelerating from what began, I don't know, three, four years ago. This is great news for marginalized voices that have here to for been silent. I mean, just look at the award-winning books in 2020 and the best sellers. It's definitely capturing the zeitgeist of Black Lives Matter, Latinx voices, LGBTQIA plus voices and the Me Too movements. They're massive right now and that's reflected in the books that are getting bought. And the popularity of these authors will only grow as time goes on. So diversity is huge. So what is publishing in the new normal? It's more diverse in author and publisher employee voices. It's more innovative in the how, what, when and where of publishing. It's more profitable if only by a small amount, but a small amount is a big deal in publishing. It is storytelling across platforms, audio, digital, print, streaming, games, you know, the game, the gaming industry hires more writers than any other industry. It does. It's growing instead of contracting it or contracting. It's indie authors, definitely have a seat at the table. It is open for business. Publishing in the new normal, new day, new year, in this new year, this new day in publishing is just gonna accelerate from all of the good things that happened because of the pandemic. Yes, some people will stop reading and go outside, but when they come back, they're still gonna read a book. So there's only so much time you can spend outside too till you run back to your cave. So yeah, publishing is going to be very healthy in 2021 and probably 2022 as well. So thank you for listening now. It's time for you to speak. I would like to know what questions you have and also on here you have how to get in touch with me. One thing I did over the pandemic was to change how I accept queries. And I had been closed to accepting queries for years. And now I am on query manager. So you go querymanager.com. Actually, I think if you just go to querymanager.com and put my name in, you'll get that. But Lori McClain is agent Savant is my cool way of putting those two identities together. Follow me on Twitter at agent Savant. Follow the agency on Twitter at atfuseliterary. Our website is fuseliterary.com. Check out our submission processes there. Look at the 10 agents that we have and see who fits you best. You can also follow us on Instagram at fuseliterary and see a lot of wonderful book covers. And that is it for me. So now I have to stop sharing, right? Stop share. Yay! There we go. Hi, that was wonderful. And yes, the Mechanics Institute, as with all other libraries have really ramped up their electronic, their e-books, their e-magazines, their e-audio books during the pandemic. So check out your local library's catalog. Oh, and e-movies. That's another thing that we branched into. Well, I'm a member and I've got to go see some of those. You do. Let's see, I just, there's one comment here. Will these slides be made available after the Zoom? The video for, the video we're making right now as we speak will be posted on the Mechanics Institute's YouTube page and shared with the Writers Conference and shared over social media. I put in the chat the link to the Mechanics Institute's YouTube channel. And what was I gonna say? I hope to get that up later today or tomorrow. You know, we can put it, we have a sfwriters.org. We have a blog, blogs and podcasts there every week. So I can put that up under a blog post and I'll do that, I'll do that later today. Just the presentation. Oh, okay. So yeah, it will be available. Okay, now let's see. Oh, but on the YouTube channel there are, I don't know, maybe 20 videos from past events that we've hosted with the Writers Conference. So there's, I encourage you to check it out because there's a lot of content and we got really creative over the pandemic. So take advantage of that. All right, our first question looks like from Bob. What are your thoughts on fiction? Which genres are in now and which are out? Any trends that you can- Yes, absolutely. Last year was all political nonfiction and mostly about Trump. So now that that has kind of been washed out of our mouths you will see not so much political nonfiction as far as fiction, genre fiction is still like the candy we like to eat and just shove it in our mouths and eat the whole thing that says shareable bag of M&Ms but we eat it all ourselves. So in romance, we're talking about genre fiction. In romance, a lot of romantic comedies, huge amount of romantic comedy. So if you have a hand, if you're a deft hand at writing those, those are good. Especially with own voices, K-dramas are from Korea. People have been watching those like mad. Now they wanna read some of them too. As far as mysteries, cozy mysteries with all kinds of heroes and heroines are big. Thrillers, not so much political thrillers that much anymore, more domestic stuff. I think it borders more on suspense than thrillers but not tech. Tech thrillers are still not all that big but things like Gone Girl where there's twisty endings and it's mostly takes place in the United States. Let's see, what else? Mysteries of science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction is still growing. A lot of space operas are big. Have diverse crews in your spaceships and your colonial colonizing ships going to Mars. I think Elon Musk has really made Mars exciting for people so they like science fiction but not super hard science fiction. Although the British audience is still very hungry for that. Fantasy, epic fantasy is kind of going down a little bit. My hope is that urban fantasy is coming back up. And I wouldn't even call it urban fantasy anymore. I'd call it modern fantasy where it takes place in current day but either the creatures or the magicians or the witches or whatever have you are interacting with us in our normal environment. Magic is really big. So I'm selling a lot of that. Just sold a modern Asian fantasy that takes place in San Francisco where San Francisco is just as much of a character as the other people. And it's just making me grin from ear to ear when I was reading that. Sold it for six figures to tour. So lots of kind of a new look at fantasy. It wouldn't be vampires in the old sense of the word. It would have to be like maybe it was energy vampires or do something with what are they the NFTs or the Bitcoins or some kind of weird technology that you have the magic for making that happen. Day traders with the idea they can prognosticate the future. As far as general fiction, women's fiction is still huge. What else? Historical fiction, absolutely. Oh my God, World War II is popping as an era for historical fiction. So if you write that, that's good. But you know what I say this about every trend it's more important that you write what you're passionate about than you try to chase a trend because by the time you chase it and get an agent and the agent tries to sell it the trend will be trending down. So you'll have missed your shot. So just go for what you love to do. Aim to set the next trend. There you go. Purpose. Bobby has a question. What role do you think agents will play in this new reality? Are they still as important to break into the industry? Very good question. I said in 2008, I mean, we formed Fuse in 2013 and what we did was we looked at every facet of what an agent does in the publishing industry and we blew it all up and we started from what made sense moving forwards. And I do see a lot of agencies doing that where they're much more their coaches their business managers, they're concentrating on more than just selling a book and moving on because that's not worth 15% anymore especially in self publishing when you can just go take 70% yourself as long as Amazon, you know, lets you do that. But I think what agents the value they get is still if you want to get into a big traditional publisher you have to have an agent. And the reason is because the editors don't want to have to do the scouring of the slush pile and they want a certain level of writing even and they turn down most of what we present to them and that's after we've read thousands of manuscript submissions a year. So I think that part of being an agent will always be there for the larger publishers. If you're talking about regional publishers, college or university publishers, niche publishers, you don't need an agent. You might want an agent to negotiate that contract for you and some agents like Jennifer Chen Tran who's always at the San Francisco Writers Conference she's from the Bradford literary agency. She's also an attorney. So she's now doing IP where she will look at your contract and read it and it has nothing to do with her being your agent. This is just another service that she independently offers. So you could get an IP attorney to look at a contract but I don't know, I have a thing of like maybe I'll post this as a blog post to you but I've got a list of 13 things that an agent does for an author and that probably makes us still desirable. I just hope at some point the shine is off the apple where everybody thinks that agents are the super powered beings that they absolutely have to have or else they're not a legitimate author because that is nonsensical and unfortunately a lot of agents believe that about themselves and if I were you, I would run away from those agents because that's crazy. You know, it's this kind of a partnership. The agent is the business half of it. You're the creative half of it. When you dovetail and work well together then your career is accelerated. That's it basically. All right, so we've talked about how agents work. We've talked about genres that are popular now. John has kind of a technical question. Does a published magazine article serve as a viable starting point for a book project and would publishers or agents view that as evidence that there's a market for this topic? Not necessarily view it as a market. If you had a magazine article that got reprinted a lot of places that had amazing viral qualities to it and caused a conversation that you can then prove by maybe capturing different places that we're talking about at different people and celebrities and whatever. If it really caused a hubbub, then yes. If it didn't cause a genuine hubbub, then probably no. But what happens is a lot of non-fiction agents and publishers read magazines and when they see an article that they think is interesting, they actually contact you. So if you haven't been contacted and your magazine article is kind of long in the tooth now I'd encourage you, if you're really interested in that area to write, if it's non-fiction you have to write a book proposal. And if you don't know what that is on Smashword Short Fuse Publishing which is our client assisted publishing arm at Fuse Literary has a kind of an e-book on it called Short Fuse Guide to Book Proposals costs 99 cents. In fact, this month until the end of the month it's free. So go to smashwords.com and all our short fuse guides are free to querying to pitching. Oh, I totally forgot about that. Yeah, so do that. And then you'll, if it's non-fiction you'll have written that. I think that's what you're talking about since an article that was fiction would probably be called the short story. So yeah, do a book proposal and then get an agent to shop that around or just write it and publish it. I'm putting the URL for those short fuse guides on Smashwords in the chat now. You're welcome. Get them, they're free, they're worth it. There's like six of them, I think and get them this month, they're free. There's a lot, yeah, there's I think six. So that's wonderful. And then Colleen has an interesting question which maybe is a great cap to this. Have you seen any really great examples of marketing lately that maybe, that really stood out for you? Oh, I'm drawing a blank now, of course. This is like the whole thing I went to school for that I did for 20 years of my life and now I can't remember anything. I think it's just taking advantage of when something goes viral. If you can take advantage of somebody else's viral moment, then that's a good thing. Or if you can create a viral moment yourself, then that's a good thing. I mean, this is so stupid, but I'll give it as an example. Pepsi just came out with a new product that's Pepsi and peeps. Those little yellow or now all different colored marshmallow little chicks. And that sounds totally disgusting to me, but I saw the can of it and I said, shouldn't this be called peepsie? Cause I thought that was funny. And it blew up and people started retweeting that and laughing about it and saying it's still gross and whatever. Now, if I had something that can continue on that either about the soft drink industry or about peeps or about Easter, that's what I'm talking about, taking advantage of a moment. Let's see, one of my best sellers just launched the first book in her best selling series. So this is like the third iteration of the Iron Fae. This is Julie Kigawa. And what she did was, she's an avid video game player and she's big on Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, I think, but it's a game-playing platform where you play and people watch you, which I do not play video games. So the idea of somebody watching somebody play video games is even more removed from my consciousness, but I'm old. So younger people love Twitch. And so she decided to have her launch party on Twitch. And it wasn't that they were, that people were watching her play any video games. She just had all of her characters on Twitch and they could ask those characters questions. So was these cute little like anime elves and Cheshire Cat-type creatures jumping around and doing things, and yet she was answering in their voices. And oh my God, that thing had like a thousand people participating and she was giving away prizes every once in a while and the different characters were, and it was really successful. So I guess that would be my example. Yeah, I'm not familiar very much with Twitch, but our chess club uses it all the time to stream games and lectures and stuff like that. So there's a whole other segment of the population that uses Twitch as its primary channel for whatever they want to consume. So, you know, move past Twitter, move past Facebook and Instagram and explore other communities because you might be able to, you might be inspired by what's on there and what is applicable to your own project. Yeah, let's see. So Rachel, you don't have to be on Twitter. Check out some of the other media streams. Colleen, this is a question. Do you have any advice for someone who would like to pitch a talk or workshop for next year's Writers Conference? Okay, so the San Francisco Writers Conference Planning Committee is meeting in June. So don't send us anything before June, but go ahead and send it to me, director at sfwriters.org after June. We do have a whole plethora of track coordinators because we have fiction, nonfiction, business and marketing, poetry, books to screen, and I know I'm forgetting some, I can't remember what I'm forgetting, but anyway, all those people actually put together the sessions, but if you send me your resume and I guess like when I say CV, I mean what workshops you've given in the past to what groups, then I'll definitely bring it in front of the track coordinators after June. So July and after, I would say by August we'll have everything set. So because this is a compressed time period, usually start this activity in March, but in March we weren't sure whether we're gonna be able to have it in person or not. We've finally said yes, I hope we don't lose our shirt. If there was ever a year that you wanted to support the San Francisco Writers Conference and come, please come in 2022. Can you tell I'm a little nervous? And then there's also the conversations that we have together, Laurie, with the Writers Conference at Mechanics. So it's a different audience than what we have, what we enjoy at the conference, but it's also a great training ground for how your talk idea will play out in front of an audience right now. Yeah, right now we're just doing virtual activities because I don't know when we'll be able to meet again in person, but we have a lot of writers at Mechanics. About a third of our members are writers. So that's more than a thousand people. So anyway, there's some overlap with the conference. Yeah, when we get back to that, that will be really special because the classes were like morning and afternoon with the break for lunch, small audience size of 50 or so people and an expert in a topic area. Yeah, I did a couple of those and they were really worthwhile for everybody. Yes, so let's see what else. Bobby has another question. What are your thoughts on writing a bait book on Amazon to generate interest in your new novel? Kind of like a prequel. So maybe she's talking about a short little e-book that would serve as an appetizer for a larger meal. Well, if you're gonna do that, put it out for free because the one thing where you get bad reviews like the number one thing is when people think they're buying a novel and they get a novelette or a novella and then they give you one star because they're like, oh, I paid 99 cents and I got this thing in it. So make sure people know what it is. You could even use that if you wanted to. This is my thinking outside of the box way of looking at publishing, right? So if you're gonna do a bait book which I've never heard before, but that's cool. If you're gonna do a short story like that, put something either in the beginning or in the end that says, I'm really interested to know whether I should write more stories in this world. Go to have something on your website or wherever they can take a survey and then you'll know whether these people actually liked it enough. I mean, if nobody responds and you know you've sold 50 books, that should give you an answer right there. But if 25 people said, yeah, I'd like that, that's 50% of the people that read it that said they'd like to read a longer book. So that's my answer. It's an interesting idea. As a reader. I haven't heard anyone doing that but I have seen a lot of examples where somebody will put the prequel or the first book out for free on KDP and then they'll charge a little bit for every book after that in a series. That's rampant on KDP. All right, are there any other questions? We're bumping up on time, but you have some kudos here. Mary says, thanks so much for the useful update and information on relevant trends. Lots of thank you. Somebody asked, oh, are we done? Cause there were two more questions I found. One, I'll ask them real quickly Taryn and then we can get off of here. Somebody asked if mystery and detective stories are still popular? Absolutely. Somebody asked as an agent whose sales are climbing, how many books are you looking for compared to previous years? How many books are you expecting to sell this year? I never have any expectations but I sold like 10 in January. So if it keeps going, yay, it has slowed down but I was selling 10 and then five and then five. So yeah, a lot of books. I'm gonna sell a lot of books this year. I'll just put that right out there. And I'm done. All right, well, thank you so much for showing us your home office. And I look forward to working with you. Yeah, it's beautiful. I look forward to working with you again. I live in a long cabin. Sorry, I keep stepping on your ending there, Taryn. And we're just yucking it up. All right, thank you for coming, Laurie. Thank you all of you for tuning in and the video will be up shortly. Stay safe, be well, and I look forward to meeting you all in person at the Mechanics Institute or at the conference next year. Meanwhile, we'll see each other virtually. All right, take care. Bye-bye.