This year's Nobel Prize in literature went to French writer and memoirist Annie Ernaux, raising the genre to the highest esteem among authors. She was lauded for “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
About her writing, she shared that she's not trying to remember but instead is “trying to be inside… To be there at that very instant, without spilling over into the before or after. To be in the pure immanence of a moment.”
I love discovering how different writers approach the creative process and make it their own. This month features author and book doula Linda Sivertsen, who has spent many years interviewing writers on the Beautiful Writers podcast. Her new book by the same name compiles the best advice from her conversations—from Liz Gilbert to Dani Shapiro to Steven Pressfield—while weaving her own journey as a writer through all of her struggles and eventual triumphs.
These days most writers are writing book proposals, whether it's for fiction or nonfiction, and Linda offers a longstanding 'how-to' course that guides you through the process with real-life examples. Scroll down to read our interview and more about Book Proposal Magic.
Linda Sivertsen, “Book Mama,” is in LOVE with books—reading, writing, and selling them. Her titles have won awards and hit all the lists as an author, co-author, and former magazine editor and ghostwriter. But her driving force has been to publish sustainably. Naïve and optimistic enough to believe in magic, she’s on a mission to save forests via her role as a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) Ambassador.
Now, in Beautiful Writers: A Journey of Big Dreams and Messy Manuscripts—with Tricks of the Trade from Bestselling Authors, Linda shares—and expands on—the best of advice and storytelling from the podcast and follow-up interviews with literary greats, including: Elizabeth Gilbert, Dean Koontz, Terry McMillan, Cheryl Strayed, Steven Pressfield, Jenny Lawson, Deepak Chopra, and Martha Beck. The wisdom in these pages will nourish anyone who appreciates the art of storytelling and dreams of living a creative life.
When she’s not fostering literary love matches on her Beautiful Writers Podcast (a favorite stop for writers on tour), writing, or midwifing books at her Carmel or virtual writing retreats, Linda can be found on the back of a horse or running with her dogs. She and her husband live on their ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona.
KARIN GUTMAN: You have carved out a life for yourself, not only as a writer but also guiding so many writers and being an influencer in the literary world.
To what do you attribute your success?
LINDA SIVERTSEN: I think the number one thing I embody, and that I help other people embody, is the belief in their own magic. I had a rebellious spirit as a kid. I'm an odd duck because I'm a rule follower, but a lot of the rules are crazy-making and so I love to learn the rules and then see how I can bend them and go beyond them.
Growing up, I never felt smart. I didn't feel book smart.
KARIN: That's ironic, given that we're working with books here.
LINDA: Yeah. But I had a very strong connection to my intuitive inner world. Growing up I saw that the systems around me didn't always make sense. I didn't buy into or understand them, or even thrive in them. I just trusted my own magic. I think that's why people are identifying with the book, because throughout the storyline you see me limited and challenged and doors closing and all sorts of chaos around me. But I just persevere because I've got a mission. I've got a dream. I've got drive, and I'll learn the craft. I'll learn how to be confident. I'll learn how to get over the bullies that thought I was an airhead in high school. I can overcome all of that because that's dependent on me. And I just knew that my success was largely always going to be dependent on me and I could depend on myself.
KARIN: What was one of your earliest examples of this magic?
LINDA: I always wanted to be a writer. It was a secret dream in my heart, but because I was in the bottom third of my graduating class in high school, I didn't have faith in my ability to make it happen. And then I didn't finish college. I left USC three classes before graduation, so there was some real shame there.
But I had a dream, a literal dream that woke me up at three in the morning. The dream gave me six books—titles, format, covers, pages of text—and told me exactly what to do. The dream was so real that I never questioned it. Never. I was like, Okay, these books are being given to me. I'm a channel for these books. Obviously, this is connected to my heart's desire. I felt so lucky to be given this gift. Now that doesn't mean there wasn't mayhem amongst the magic the entire way, because mayhem is a big part of this storyline, but I think that the magical part was so big for me. It was so impactful that my confidence never wavered.
I think because I'm so aware of the things I overcame, I can then impart that certainty to other people. You may not be certain about your writing, but I'll be certain for you, and together we'll get it done.
KARIN: What happened with those six books?
LINDA: Beautiful Writers is a self-help book, an advice book for writers, but it's also partially a writing memoir. Throughout the story, we see that I pick the book that means the most to me, Lives Charmed. As I'm struggling to birth her, all these other books that I dreamed about keep getting birthed by other authors. So, it creates this urgency and panic. Never about confidence in my own abilities, but an urgency and panic about time, like, I have a dream but I'm hitting so many roadblocks. Will I be able to birth them?
I think it was spirit’s way of scaring the crap out of me, so that I wouldn't let go of the original book as I was facing obstacle after obstacle. Because you have to be dogged, you have to be perseverant.
KARIN: What was the tipping point for Lives Charmed?
LINDA: My agent said that the editors wanted bigger names. Eventually, Leeza Gibbons, Arnold Palmer, and Woody Harrelson all agreed to be included. That was the missing piece. Once I had that trifecta, it was a quick sale.
KARIN: Is landing a publishing deal with a top-five publisher still the goal from your point of view?
LINDA: It is for many, and sometimes myself, but not for Beautiful Writers. I had a follow-up meeting with a top five publisher when I was selling it, and I cancelled the meeting because I fell in love with BenBella in the interim. BenBella is not a top five publisher. They're not even in New York. They're in Dallas, Texas. But they had the vision that I had. I wanted my book to be printed on Forest Stewardship Council paper and to give a percentage of profits to forest restoration. They got excited about that. And the big publisher who has a really nice environmental record didn't seem the least bit excited. So I'm definitely not just a proponent of the big ones.
KARIN: I know you have relationships with a lot of agents and publishers. How do you navigate which of your clients to introduce?
LINDA: I have to be really careful. In the beginning, I would send people before they were ready. I would be talking to an agent and saying, Oh my gosh, you're just gonna love this gal, yada yada. I learned quickly that unless the writing is stunning in black and white, independent of who that person is, that we cannot go to agents or publishers no matter how much I love this person. No matter how close I am to the agent or the publisher. Because if they're not wowed by what they're seeing on the page, I lose credibility and then the next person I pitch gets less attention. I was very blessed that I wrote for so many of the publishers as a ghostwriter. That's where I developed the relationships and skill building.
I think we're all good at different things. You're probably far better than I am at story development. Everybody's got their thing. I'm pretty psychic with people's books, so I no longer want to do deep dive story development like I did when I was a ghostwriter because that's so intensive. I prefer to put that kind of intensity into my own work. But I can see the broad strokes, the big picture. I can take a whole bunch of disjointed things and put it together and outline it really quickly and easily and that's fun for me. But man, doing what you do is a real value and it saves people sanity, because when somebody doesn't know how to take their material and create an arc with it, and a compelling through-line and themes and all of that, doing what you do is a gift from God.
KARIN: Thank you. That’s a nice reflection.
You say that tenacity and perseverance are key. How much do you think that platform plays into the success of an author and salability of a book?
LINDA: I think that as the traditional publishing world continues to merge and get smaller, it's going to be harder and harder to publish traditionally, and platforms will become more important.
I still have clients that sell books with very little social media. One gal got a million-dollar advance last year from Simon & Schuster. She only has 1,200 social media followers. So that still happens.
KARIN: What genre?
LINDA: Self-help. It’s about outlining your dream life. Very mass market.
I had a gal who got a half-million dollars, again for a book without very much social media at all. That was a diet book, and she has a great diet business. She's an expert in her field. Not famous, but willing to go on podcasts and do social media and interviews, and with a really great angle to the topic.
I have several novelist clients who get $100,000 with no social media. They're writing book proposals that are so compelling. The chapter by chapter outlines are thorough, the format works. The marketing ideas are smart and savvy and concise and the authors are lovable. I'm thinking about three of them right now and they're mediagenic. They can walk and talk and look good. They're fearless. They'll put themselves on video and stick it on their social media for 1,000 people, but it's clear that they're going to be marketing forevermore. They're tenacious and the publisher is looking at those people saying, Let's give them a shot because their material is phenomenal and we're willing to bank on them. Odds are we won't lose money and maybe we'll make big.
KARIN: Is it standard for novelists to write proposals?
LINDA: Everyone I know who's a novelist does. When I interviewed Liz Gilbert and Marie Forleo last year for the podcast, I asked, Liz, “What is the last proposal you wrote?” She said the one for City of Girls. So even Liz Gilbert, who had already had a hit with Signature of All Things was writing a book proposal for her next novel. There's a thriller writer whom I just adore, her name is Tosca Lee, she releases about a book a year. They're all fiction, and she said she would never, ever sell a novel without a proposal.
The magic of a proposal is that you’re crafting the key points for your agent to hit with publishers. Later, your acquiring editor may use these same words when pitching you to bookstores and media, etc., because you’ve already done that crafting of sentences and angles and hooks for them. Why anybody would want to sell a book without doing that ahead of time is beyond me. Good luck trusting that a 24-year-old at some PR department is going to do it for you when they've got 30 other titles they're doing.
The beauty is, if you don't sell it, now you've got the blueprint for self-publishing. Go create the book yourself. And then you can promote it with all the angles and hooks and everything else that you put into the proposal.
KARIN: How do you guide the writers you work with?
LINDA: Every person is different. It's almost a vibrational thing. When I'm sitting with somebody I can often feel what their timeline looks and feels like. I frequently sense if it’s going to be a slow burn and they’ll need to take the time to develop other ways in which they can help themselves. One way is relationships in their genre, taking the time to comment on the writers that you love and getting on their radar and going to their book signings. If they're teaching a retreat, go to their retreat, get some connections. Maybe they'll give you a blurb. It's not unheard of to put in a proposal that you've studied with so and so or that you have hired a novelist to review your manuscript. There are all sorts of ways to do that slow relationship building.
I have one client who is so humble. She doesn't have a lot of ego. I felt like her path was going to be a slower one. I felt like she needed to have those connections, to buoy her competence and to help her build a community around her that would lift her up. So she's taken the time and it's been beautiful to watch. It's been a couple years and now her confidence is golden. She's got great connections. She's got a couple of blurbs and way more ‘look at me’ energy. I'm about ready to send her out to agents. I can't wait. I think she's going to be really successful. But it was a slow build.
Other people are on fire right away, and you can feel that. I'm thinking of one gal, she's writing about a tragedy in South America. It's a novel but the issue that she's writing about is really timely. I wouldn't recommend that she do a slow build. I would recommend that she get out there right now because her topic is in the news all the time and the quality of the writing is so good. We did send it out and she's gotten some phenomenal feedback and we're waiting to see if anybody picks it up. But if they don't pick it up, my advice would be for her to start getting in the media with the topic, because it's is also under-reported. If she were to help make the topic more famous, through writing about it, it would be a really good thing.
KARIN: What do you have to say about the genre of memoir specifically?
LINDA: There’s a lot of dismal talk about memoir. They say since the explosion of certain big memoirs, there's a glut in the market and it's harder to sell them. All of that is true. But I never want to limit anybody or the universe.
My book Beautiful Writers started out as a memoir. It was about my divorce called My Midlife Mess. When I went to sell it in 2016, my agent and I took meetings in New York. The meetings were really confusing because some of the editors loved the struggling writing stories and wanted more of those. And then some of the editors were like, Why do you have so many struggling writing stories, this is a divorce memoir. So there was a real disconnect. I had originally thought it was two books, but I didn't believe I was famous enough as an author to pull off writing them, so I combined them. Those editors were mirroring my own doubts. I have since been so grateful that those meetings didn't go well because when I put the book down for a while and walked away from it, I saw a whole new version that could be crafted from the podcast—snippets from these wise, beloved authors amidst my own struggling writing stories. There was the potential of making it a 'memoir with', a 'memoir plus', a 'memoir and'.
That's why my own experience has taught me not to limit anybody. Okay, so there's a lot of competition. But in my head, there's always a way.
Here's the key: Is the writer patient enough, tenacious enough, committed enough to take the time to find that specific way to tell the story? Not everybody is. I was not going to be on my deathbed carrying this book. No fucking way, because I've seen that over and over. I've seen the person who called me 10 years ago and said they couldn't wait to finish their memoir, who died recently still talking about it. To me that's tragic. So I was willing to carry this book around and work on this book for years and years and years until I figured it out. Not everybody has that determination, and that's okay.
Or you write the memoir and give it to your family. My family, including my ex-husband, found so much healing in my divorce memoir, which is a whole other story and incredibly miraculous because believe me, he wasn't written as a hero. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do with her, but perhaps she never needs to be published because she healed me and she helped my family.
KARIN: Each book has its own life force, right?
LINDA: No doubt.
In Linda's own words:
Book Proposals are a BIG deal and an even bigger document. (I’ve seen them come in anywhere between 20-120 pages with sample chapters. As an example, summarizing 30 chapters could take 15-30+ pages alone!) There’s a lot to include. But rest easy. We’re breakin’ it dowwwwn. Section by section. You’ll look back and say, “Whoa! I did all that?! That was easier than I thought!” Trust yourself. And, your muse.
Buy the book
To learn more about Linda Sivertsen, visit her site.
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