Danielle LaPorte knows a lil’ something about the publishing racket.

Want a book deal? Think your magnetic, compelling, ninja talent for the written word is all it takes?

Think again.

Now, says author/blogger/truth-telling goddess Danielle LaPorte, “two-thirds of a publisher’s decision is based on your platform”.

In other words, your blog. How famous are you? How big does your audience and ‘platform’ need to be?

“Pretty fucking huge, apparently…” continues LaPorte, whom I interviewed in September 2009 after she returned from New York where she was shilling her latest book proposal to agents and publishers, “because I just got told I’m not famous enough.”

———

Hold up. Whaaaaaa? Didn’t Danielle LaPorte announce a mega-mega-mega book deal (like, a quarter of a million bucks?!) earlier this year?

Yup.

So what’s this “not famous enough/no book deal” business?

The past, baby. The past. That snippet above is from an interview I did with Danielle in 2009. Then, she’d just returned from New York…and although she was already a published author of a hawt book (Style Statement) with lots of media mentions and the creatrix of the searingly smart WhiteHotTruth, she came back without a book deal.

A year and some change later, she had a 4-book, $250K book deal.

Which is why, if YOU want a book deal (and oh honey, I want a book deal, too), you NEED Danielle LaPorte’s newest book/program/detailed insider plan to change yer life/publish yer masterpieces already, dammit.

(I’m lecturing both of us, pumpkin. ‘Cuz we really need to get on this.)

Because she knows of what she speaks. Danielle’s landed literary agents. She’s written query letters and book proposals, published a book, had a book proposal rejected, self-published, wrote another book proposal…

…and that one landed her that six-figure, four-book deal.

So chicka has written books. She’s promoted books. She’s self-published. She’s published. She’s written book proposals that failed and books proposals that succeeded wildly (as in $250,000!) which means  that when it comes to getting a book deal Danielle LaPorte knows – from intimate, incandescent experience - what works and what doesn’t work.

In short, Danielle LaPorte knows the book biz.

And now she’s telling you what she knows.

I wanna know what she knows.

————-

In a former life, Danielle LaPorte was freelance book publicist for publishing houses like Simon and Schuster and Harper Collins. Now she has a juju personal development site called White Hot Truth, a rockin’ inspirational speaking career, a published book (Style Statement with co-author Carrie McCarthy, which they sold to prestigious Little Brown and Company for a $150,000 advance), and soon-to-be published book (The Firestarter Sessions) that’s part of a whopper of a book deal with Random House (four books, a quarter of a million bucks, am I repeating myself?).

And back when she sold her very first book, she didn’t even have a blog. True story.

But she did have moxy. And a big love for Malcolm Gladwell (yes! Malcolm Gladwell! Poet-wooing, point-tipping, intellectual whodunit-spinning, best-selling, Malcolm Gladwell!), which is how she found her first agent.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell “profusely, adoringly thanked his agent” whom, he argued, should be the “next president of the United States or at the very least the CEO of Microsoft.”

Danielle read that and thought, “she’ll do”.

And then Danielle e-mailed Malcolm Gladwell.

(Duh! Who wouldn’t?)

She put on her charming pants and danced. She wrote, “I’m Canadian. You’re Canadian. You’re from Etobicoke. I know how to pronounce Eh-toe-bih-ko. You’re half-black. I have dreadlocks. Here’s my concept. Help me get to your agent.”

Malcolm Gladwell replied within two days, writing, “You’re so charming. How could I refuse?”

To recap: kissing best-selling Gladwell ass can land you an agent. If that fails, your blog is your baseball/cornfield and if you build it they will come. If that fails, try calling around, knocking on doors, writing query letters (and maybe even reading books!) and asking for one directly.

But by all means and by whatever means necessary, get an agent, and a good one, and one you like (even love), because a good agent will help you write and sell a great proposal…and because, as Danielle explains, “it is a potentially life-changing relationship. Your agent will be your greatest advocate. They will want to get you the most money, because, you know, they’re getting 10-15% of it, so they will want to get you the exposure.”  Not only that, but “the right agent will actually work with you to craft that book. They could be hugely influential in the finished product. They will go to the mat to you in the end on everything from price point to pub date to cover design. It is really important.”

And the writer/agent chemistry doesn’t have to be interpersonal-clicky-butterflies love. It can be professional luuuuv. “It may sound contradictory,” admits Danielle, “but you and your agent don’t need to see eye-to-eye on the material. You need to have free reign with your voice. An agent can be philosophical opposition and still go get you a good deal and help bolster your career.”

———-

Did you know this? Of course you probably knew this. Every writer knows they need to get an agent to get published.

What we don’t necessarily know is how to get an agent (either through conventional or unconventional channels like the aforementioned Gladwell ass-kissing, and I WOULD TOTALLY DO THAT, no strings attached, Malcolm, CALL ME).

Or how to write a book proposal.

Or what successful book proposals – from published authors, like Tim Ferris (The 4 Hour Body), Michael Ellsberg (The Malaria Book), and Rachel Resnick (Love Junkie) - ACTUALLY look like and contain. ‘Cuz what is IN a book proposal, anyway? (And what was in theirs?)

Let me tell you (and guess where and from whom I learned this?): a book proposal contains a map of the book (the table of contents), your bio, market research (ie where does this fit? Who will read it?), marketing (how will you and the publisher sell the pants off it?) and oh yes, some sample chapters to show that you really can write more than a proposal. Also: the exact weight of your platform. Who are you? How big are you? Who is talking about you? How do you talk back? How much does the world – in the form of Alexa and Google and Facebook and Twitter and your blog traffic and  your list of subscribers and e-mail open and click-thru rates – love you?

———

When she was writing her book proposals – including The Whopper 4-Book/Lotsa Cash Deal - Danielle LaPorte worked with proposal guru Linda Siverston (not coincidentally co-authors Big Beautiful Book Plan with her) and then “when it felt right to go out of the box, I did. I am not Times New Roman. I am not double-spaced”.

———

And so if you are not double-spaced Times New Roman, either, AND you want a book deal, too…

…then you know what to do.

(Same thing Imma gonna do. Follow the advice. Rrrrawk the whitehawt, Big Beautiful Book plan. And get thee – and me – a book deal in 2012.)

 


December 14, 2011 | filed under: How To Get a Book Deal, People

2 people have we need you too.

I Give Good Bio

pssst…just so you know: I’m selling a lil’ sumthin’ sumthin’ herein. I had planned to time off, but my loverloverman is home (gotta love Canada and parental leave!) and my baby is angelic and easy, and I’m jonesing to work. So I’m going to work. (Hopefully for you, dearest Reader.) But I only want to do my favourite things – which raises a whole series of questions, starting with why would I build a business around anything else???? – which in turn means for the next little while, I’ll only be offering Bio/About Pages, Red Shoe Blogger sessions, and Naked Branding (more coming – ahem- on that one, later).

And bios are one of my very favourite things. That might not matter to you…except that what that means for you is that I write really, really great bios. I have a bit of a formula for them, and it goes like this: write bios that stir.

Stir.

And inspire.

Over and over again.

Because what’s the most visited – and therefore  the most important – page on your website?

For all the effort we put into blogging, it’s probably not a blog post…

…it’s probably your About page. (Also known as your bio).

And the thing about most bio pages is this: they’re almost always boring.

And ineffective.

Here are The Most Common Sins of The Boring Bio:

  • CV-ism: contains a lot of distant, bland, professional language and chronological rather than competency-demonstrating sentences like “and then I went to this school, and then I got this job, at which place I performed these duties…”. If this bio wore clothes it would be clad in beige khakis. Utterly inoffensive, utterly unmemorable, utterly unacceptable.
  • Third person: come on, we all know you wrote it. (Or hired someone to write it!) Own it. Say I. Aye? Aye.
  • Self-deprecating: if you’re Oprah Winfrey, Desmond Tutu or Bill Gates; if you have a gazillion dollars, a Nobel prize or are a household name; then and only then may you mock or be modest about your qualifications, competencies or history. (Unless said self-deprecation demonstrates your abilities as a case-in-point.) So the bio that suggests a lack of confidence and that you’re not convinced that you deserve business? NO. No matter how quirky and cute.
  • Overstating and empty: “We aim to be global leaders in the knick knack industry”. What does that even mean? And is it true? Do people who say those things really want to be global leaders? Or do they just want to build a profitable business in dust collectors? Please don’t do this. Be real. Say what it is you aim to accomplish.
  • All About Me-ism: Actually, your bio is about you  but it’s also not about you at all. It’s about what you can do for your people. It’s a sales page (but only in the heart-centred, non-smarmy sense).

And that’s why it’s a great idea to INVEST in a screamingly effective bio. Because your bio is often the last thing a client reads before deciding yes, yes, YES, I must work with this person. Your bio is the pivot point between yes and no, between you and the other guy.

And when someone else interviews you extensively (which is what a great bio writer MUST do) they see the patterns in your history, practice and skills and can articulate your abilities and qualifications in a gracious, compelling, convincing way…

…a way that often you’d be too self-conscious or modest to do yourself.

Whilst avoiding the most common sins of the average bio.

Because you’re not average nor are you running an average business.

So that’s why you need a bio writer. Because your bio must not be average. It must be miraculous.

And bold, badass, beautiful bios are my specialty. If I do say so myself.

(Call or e-mail me and I’ll show you some samples of badass bios I wrote for other bold ‘n beautiful people.)

So please go ahead and hire me to write you a bio that rocks your (online) world.

Badass Bio (includes extensive interviewing but it’s fun, fabulous and totally effective) $450

(or e-mail me at kelly@kellydiels.com)
December 8, 2011 | filed under: Uncategorized

1 person has we need you too.

The Two Orgasm a Day Diet #2: You Sexy Mama, You

———————–

As I type this from my station on the sofa (AKA “my home office”), my newborn Love Child is sweetly snuffling and stirring in the bassinet a few feet away. And my loverloverman has my feet in his lap AND HE’S MASSAGING THEM.

———————–

My life is an endless orgasm right now.

I am all full up. Blissed out. Fulfilled. My spirit, my psyche, my sexuality – as a woman, lover, mother – is utterly, entirely nourished. I am nourished.

Which is what divine wise woman/life poet/coach/heart friend Liane Raymond tells me orgasm actually means: the sanskrit root of orgasm means “nourish”.

And that is EXACTLY what I’m trying to get at with The Two Orgasm a Day Diet. I want all of us to be our most luscio us, fulfilled, nourished selves. I want us all to revel in the pleasures of our skin and flesh and imaginings and action and use that place of pleasure and power as fuel for every adventure and aspect of our lives.

AND I want us to know that  being sexy doesn’t have to be a bit part in a Girls Gone Wild loop. You don’t have to flash titty to be titillating (but you can if you want to but please make sure it’s you who wants to and that it gives you pleasure ). You don’t have to fall within the cultural parameters of “hot” to be hot. You don’t have to be the thinnest or most conventionally pretty woman in the room to be the sexiest woman in the motherfucking building.

Now let’s talk about “motherfucking”. I lovehate that phrase. It makes me uncomfortable. It delights me. The very fact that this phrase is used as a curse tells us so much: that it is a slip, a degradation, to have sex with a mother. And that, in turn, tells us that mothers are unfuckable, not sexy, not sexually desirable…and given the conflation of attractiveness with a woman’s worth in our world, that means that women who are mothers are themselves not valuable.

(MILF denotes much the same thing. There’s implicitly surprise built into the acronym. Like, WHAT? My dick gets hard for a mother?! Can’t be!)

———————

OMIGOD now my loverloverman just told me loves my feet, that they’re soft and cute.  Could this moment, this life, get better?

(I’m totally tipping the pedicurist more next time.)

———————

Which, I think, is one of the reasons we worry about our appearance and our sex lives after mothering. Beyond just the physical challenges and constraints of mothering – dear Reader, I am currently inhabiting a restless place about 60 wretched miles past exhausted and my sexiest fantasy involves eight hours of uninterrupted sleep – we grapple with the cultural message that now we are unfuckable. And therefore un-valuable.

(As opposed to invaluable, which is actually the truth of the matter.)

And it’s not just a cultural message. That’s the thing about cultural norms and media messages: there’s no way to know ourselves outside of them. They are outside of us and inside of us. They are part of us and we are part of them. They’re ingrained into our memories, expectations, flesh and spirit.

But the one that says mothers aren’t sexy is just not true.

Or at least it doesn’t have to be true.

(Don’t let it be true for you.)

self portrait entitled "I just had a baby six days ago. Yes, I did."

Because mothering can be miraculous, divine, and empowering. As an extraordinary woman I know says, ”Superman can leap tall buildings in a single bound. I can nourish small humans using only my breasts”. And so the physical, biological side of mothering – being pregnant, giving birth (or, alternately, having an entire human carved from my abdominal cavity WHILE I AM STILL CONSCIOUS), breastfeeding - divorces me from twenty years of bodily doubt and marries me to marvel at my own physical prowess. All my suspicions or long-held convictions that my body is flawed dissolve in the soup of awe and wonder. I am a wunderkind. A wonder woman. I make people, people!

And then I do the real work of mothering, which of course isn’t necessarily embedded in the physical viscera of wombs and boobs and birth (there is so much more to mothering than fertility and biology). I rise four times a night to feed a hungry little person. And then I get up at 6am to feed two more hungry little people and get them to school. And then I feed them several more times a day. And that’s the least of it all.

I digress.

My point: becoming a mother and marveling at what my body is capable of – what I am capable of – freed me from physical insecurities, insecurities which inhibited the sexuality of my early adulthood.

And I suspect that this is true of other physical experiences that might (erroneously) be presumed to be sexually catastrophic. In any woman’s life there are other accidents, occurrences, scars, diagnoses and recoveries that apparently devastate our attractiveness while actually connecting us to our physical strength, sensuality and life-reverence and relish.

And so the very thing that probably “ruined” my body – the stretch marks, the c-section scars, the weight gain (I have baby weight that is now school age) – made me sexier. In my own mind. And that’s where The Two Orgasm a Day Diet starts.

———————–

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to remove my feet from the lap of my loverloverman – I’ll straddle it instead – and kiss him ’til he can taste how much I love, adore and desire him.

Or until the baby wakes up.

———————–

December 6, 2011 | filed under: Two Orgasm a Day Diet

7 people have we need you too.

Love Child

Dori worked in the deli at Safeway on Davie near Denman. She was forty something and made half her age in wages per hour. (It was the early nineties. There was a healthy collective agreement.) Dori had dark brown hair dyed a fire-lit red and a heart to match the heat of that hue. She was the oldest woman in the deli and she mothered us but never really felt older than us. She giggled. She hugged hard. She worked hard or at least harder than us. Her bean salad was divine. She had a Polish accent because she was from Poland (this is how it works, usually) and she’d come to Canada eighteen or nineteen years ago. She had a husband she’d had for fifteen years and kids she’d had for eighteen and thirteen years, respectively.

There’s a story in those numbers, of course.

Dori laughed and smiled except when she talked about her husband, who didn’t much delight her. I got the impression that he was overbearing, patriarchal, bossy, old-world; but I’m mostly surmising because she never said a lot about him. She was a talker, so there’s a story in that, too.

Dori talked a lot about her children, and when she did, she did the proud-mama-keep-on-glowing thing. I was nineteen. I’d never been friends with a mother of teenagers. I’d never seen anything like her indulgent maternal joy and I wondered if all mothers were like this. (They’re not.) I wondered if my mother talked about me like this but I doubted it. With good reason. For example, I also doubted that Dori’s daughter came home from university at Christmas and told her mother “You’re just mad at me because I’m smarter than you and you know it.” I didn’t know much about mothering – or even about my own mother, really – but I knew it had to be hard to wax proudly poetic about that kind of kid. And I was that kind of kid.

But Dori treated me like an adult. Like a woman. Like a peer. And so she was peerless in my eyes.

I’d do things – like really, truly execute every single closing duty at the deli if I knew she was opening the next morning – for her that I wouldn’t do for anyone else. And she did something for everyone else, too. She told the truth.

Like the time our deli manager, Laura, came to work wearing tinted glasses. Not sunglasses, exactly, but not exactly not sunglasses, either. And it was December. And she had two black eyes. And she was avoiding eye contact. I immediately assumed her boyfriend was an asshole and was wildly concerned which made her wildly uncomfortable. She calmed my fierce imaginings with the real story: a tumble off her bike – right over the handle bars, actually – on the sea wall. Freakin’ rollerblader came out of nowhere.

I believed her. Hell, last week I’d almost been her. Those rollerbladers really were out of control. And so it was good story. I told Dori the story later and that’s when I learned it was only a story.

Dori laughed ’til tears streamed down her face. “She didn’t have an accident. She had her eyes done!”

And so she had. And everyone knew except me, which made me wonder why I needed to be lied to – I was wounded, truth be told – and why women lie about cosmetic surgery. If I ever have anything done, I would (will!) laminate and carry and flash the receipt with proud abandon.

So I could trust Dori to tell the truth. About other people’s eyelifts and the secret of her spinach dip (it’s really good) and her marriage (not so good, and who ever admits that outside their circle of intimates?) and about her children.

Her thirteen year old son played soccer and was a joy. A joy. He made her laugh. He was affectionate and a mama’s boy and comical despite his precocious rigidity. He liked things a certain way. He was his father’s son. But, unlike his father, she talked about her son endlessly and was endlessly emotional about him. She loved him.

And then there was her daughter. If she glowed about her son, when she talked – or thought – about her daughter, her radiance was nearly nuclear. It was a daily day-glow love. She called her daughter her ‘love child’.

Because she really was. Dori’s daughter was not her husband’s child. In Poland, as a young woman, Dori had an affair with an older, Catholic, married man. And it was love. It was really, really love. And it couldn’t be. What came to be was that she became pregnant, left Poland, came to Canada and gave birth to her lovely little girl made from love.

Nearly two decades later, she softened when she told the story. She still loved that older, Catholic, married businessman. He visited yearly and every year her daughter went to Poland – presumably discreetly – to visit him. And even though he never left his wife, never made a life with Dori, left her to raise a child on her own, it had been love. It seemed like it was love, still. She talked about that man. She rarely talked about her husband.

Then, that was hard for me to grasp: I was a very young woman with polar, magnetic ideas about love and life. Like, if it was love then you made a life together. If you had a life together, you didn’t make love to – or love – someone else. So, if Dori’s lover was married, then he didn’t – couldn’t – really love her. It wasn’t really love. That’s what my dichotomized romantic morals and total lack of life experience told me. And that’s why I was stunned at the way she freely – proudly, romantically – “admitted” her transgression (the affair with a married man) and her mistake (the unwed pregnancy).

That was my reality. That’s probably most of the world’s reality. But it wasn’t Dori’s. She walked in the memory of her one true love. She looked at the living incarnation of that love, every day. Her daughter was her love child.

I wish everyone was a love child.

—————-

Our love child is Theo. He’s two weeks old, today.

December 2, 2011 | filed under: Family, Love

12 people have we need you too.