MARCELA LANDRES interview by RAMIRO BURR 6/7/2003
Transcribed by intern Jennifer Litz
Abbreviations: publ. = publishing; prev. = previous; AA = African American; Ed. = editor; comm. = communities; inst. = instance; explo. = explosion;
co. = companies; des. = design.

(This is a rough unedited interview with Marcela Landres by Ramiro Burr to help aspiring writers get an idea of other tips and suggestions from an experienced agent.)

For more info on Marcela Landres and her workshops, go to www.marcelalandres.com

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE THE TOP TWO OR THREE POINTS YOU'RE GOING TO HAMMER HOME?
The number one thing writer's should know is that half their job is to be the best writer they can; the other half of their job just as important is to familiarize themselves and master the business side of publishing and to network extensively with the literary comm.. because most unpublished or unhappily published authors are that way because they think that their only job is to be the best writer they can and that's what they spend 100 percent of their time on. They spend no time on the buss. Side of things, of the marketing and promotions, on getting to know the literary comm. and getting to develop relationships with people who can help them get to where they want to go with their writing career. Because, just writing a book is a creative endeavor; but if you want a writing career, that's a career, that's a business. And you have to run it as such or you'll be disappointed.

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF THE NETWORKING WITH SOMEBODY
For instance, I get two proposals for a novel. And both are more or less equal in terms of quality of writing. But one is by a writer who has done nothing but immerse himself in the craft of writing; hasn't taken an MSA course, not taken writing classes, he doesn't know anyone in the literary comm. he doesn't know anyone in the media; he doesn't know anyone in publishing, etc. Doesn't know people who can help him review his book, he doesn't know people who could blurb his book, doesn't know people who could help create a buzz. The other manuscript which is equal in terms of quality to the other one; its by an author who went to a prestigious MSA program and developed a very good relationship with a writing teacher who became his mentor and one day at a cocktail party he introduced his protégé, the writer, to this agent, and this agent took him on; which is how many writers find their agent. So the agent knew exactly where to send his author to, sent it to all the right editors all the right publishing houses. Because that writer has taken many writing classes and joined writing workshops and to volunteer for nonprofit orgs that cater to the lit or cultural comm. He knows people who are journalists and people who work in radio and film, who he has given a shoulder to cry on and now their going to return the favor by doing their best to review it to talk about it at radio stations and TV stations and the co's. where they work; and he's got friends who've been published; he knew them when they weren't published because it made sure to know people in the writing community, and you know, they're going to blurb his book. That's the difference between just writing and someone who makes it their buss. To immerse themselves in the literary and publishing comm.

SO THE IDEA IS TO FOCUS ON ADMIN. OF BUSINESS AS A WRITER?
First of all to acknowledge that there's a difference between a writer and having a writing career; difference between being published and happily published. The diff. Is how you manage your writing career and whether you choose to manage that career or not. Because many artists and writers make mistake of letting someone else manage the business side and career; all they have to do is the writing and someone else has to worry about the pesky details of business but at end of day the only true manager of your career is the writer. If you look at artists in the film industry or music industry, there's so much money to be made that actors/musicians have managers and agents. Agents worry about contracts but managers worry about career; and they will sit down, and say "discussion of hypothetical what agent says: this is how we're going to get you 20 million dollars per film, etc… Manger worries about the larger picture, agent worries about the fine print in contract… "But in book publishing there's so little money; literary agents only, and they are not managers. Literary agents worry about the contract to a small degree, but you don't have someone who sits down and asks what your ultimate goal as a writer is, and where you want your career to go. No one has that function in publishing. The author has to take on that role; authors who do not take on that role are the ones unpublished, or unhappily published.

WHICH SPECIFIC ROLE ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
The role of the manager.

ADMINISTRATION?
Administration makes it sound like something its not; paperwork and Xeroxing. Managing your career is the big vision; are you going to be a theatre actor, film actor, or both, literary actor, poet, etc. Someone who manages thinks about strategy, and thinks where you are in you career, where do you want to be at the end. And writers just think about the book, the page, sentence and the word.

WHAT ABOUT THE LATINO WRITER IN THE PUBLISHING PROCESS WHATS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO SAY ABOUT THAT?
The role of the Latino writer in the publishing process is to be the ends and the drive to train. It is to be aware that with the possible exception of himself and maybe his editor, no one on his publishing team is going to be Latino. His job to educate his publishing team on how best to reach the Latino market because he is the market. So he has to anticipate the needs of the cover designer, for inst. Because the cover des. is not Latino, and does not know what a Latino character, other than stereotype should be, and therefore what the image and the cover should be. So the issue is that the publishing company is in charge of what the cover is, and whether there's a tour and how the book will be marketed and packaged and promoted and because its our money, we are investing our money in the book and we're spending it on the marketing and publicity so all the final decisions on what's done and how its done are up to the publisher. Summary: So if we spend 1,000 dollars on cover and show it to the author and he doesn't like it, we'll say too bad because it was too expensive to redo. That happens all the time. And if the author knows this, he can at the beginning sit down with the editor to ask what he needs to give to the ed's colleagues so they can do their job. What can I convey to you, to cover designers to understand what the book should be, because no one is going to read the book. Whenever a book is published, its unlike that anyone but the editor and copy ed. Is going to read the book.
End summary. All the things that go into the success of the book, none of these people involved in doing this work are doing the decisions affecting the book, have read the book. Don't have time. So the author has to understand the publishing process. Esp. the Latino author has to understand that they're going to have decisions and choices to make without truly understanding the market because they are not part of the market.

SO WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TIP ON HOW TO FIND A GOOD AGENT.
One step: Make new friends. The new friends should be happily published writers. Unpublished writers make mist. Of hanging out with unpublished Writers. That's going to get you nowhere. Unpublisheds Serious about a writing career should hang out with and nuruture relations with happily pub. Writers who they can conspire to become their mentors, to teach them the tricks the trade. And to inspire these mentors to go out of their way and help them, for inst. To introduce them to their agents and editors. I say this because my job as an ed. Is to develop relations with agents . I constantly ask them, where do you find writers, and nine time out of ten an agent says, "I don't look for writers, don't need new writers" because a successful agent has a staple of authors whose books bring in money on a reg. Basis. They don't need new writers to keep them at the financial level to keep them happy. When do agents take on new writers if not looking? Writers they already work with come to them with, "I have a protégé, I like their writing, I would like you to read it and possibly represent them." And as a favor to the writer they already represent the agent will read it and maybe if they like it, take it on, because they don't need to. Translation: Agents aren't looking for you and don't need you, and the exception is when someone who is already a happily pub. Writer comes to them and asks them to read the new writer's work, you need to make friends with that published writer who has an agent. And that's how you find your agent.

Think of finding the right agent or ed. Or publishing house as applying to college. When high school student and identifying prospective colleges, you don't fill out app's to every college. Only you can determine what your best bet is: you're going to make a list of 5 or 10 or 15 colleges that are right for you depending on your needs. If you're going to be a writer, need to identify good creative writing programs in college, etc. Eds and agents are like colleges because they're not one size fits all; they have weaknesses and they have strengths; some are good at travel books, some are not. Some are good at mystery, some are not. You need to identify and create a short list of agents, eds, and publishing houses that are good at mysteries. And are interested in publishing Latino writers and literature. There are only so many of them.

WHAT IS THE SIG. OF THE LATINO EXPLOSION OF THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? RICKY MARTIN, JENNIFER LOPEZ, ETC.
Mostly music and some degree film, because film is still not quite what it should be. A tiny bit television too. I would say that just like pub industry, the other forms of media with Latin explosion, are publicly created companies with stockholders. Has everything to do with the Latin explo. Because if you are a media co, you are probably owned by a larger multinational company, that is publicly traded, and has stockholders and what value of stock to increase, which means you have to keep growing as a company, have to sign new customers for service. And if you saturated your market for music, ex, music for white people, then how do you grow? One way is to create products for groups of people who have been prev. neglected, to whom you could sell. Like a new China; Latino market is like that in that no one has really payed much attention to them, there's a lot of us, we have money, but no one has really created products that appeal to us. So the second Ricky Martin hit, everyone said, we need to do more of this so we can get these Latinos to go out and buy his album and make the co. richer and make the stockholders happy. So that's happened; African Americans have been really successful at that. So that's my proof that publicly created companies need to grow into other markets, because the film industry is making money in the AA com, the TV market is also in this market, the book industry is making money catering to the AA market. That hasn't really happened for the Latino market in book publishing. Everyone is aware of the census, all these numbers about the buying power of Latinos, but the book pub. Industry hasn't quite figured out how to create book that will appeal to Latinos so that they will go out en mass and buy huge quantities of that book. But they need to do this because they need to grow, and the profit margins in the publ. Industry are very slim. And esp. right now with the economy being really bad, and people are not buying books. I think they're buying DVDS if anything at all; they don't seem to be buying books. The pub. Industry has been around a long time, and have developed expertise in publish. By for and about Anglos. Only since 1992 since the publication of "Waiting to Exhale" that they learned how to publish books by and for AA's. Still haven't figured out for Latinos. But know there's money to be made, and are interested and intrigued and want to figure it out but haven't.

Other media companies are industries similar to book publishing in that they're creative products. The companies are similar because they're large and multinational publicly traded. Similar companies to book publ. Have succeeded in making money in the Latino market. We would like to follow suite.

THAT'S WHY YOUR COMPANY AND OTHER COMPANIES HAVE CREATED LATINO DIVISIONS.
Actually our Latino div. Existed before Ricky Martin. Been around since '95.

BUT RICKY KINDA ACCELERATED IT. SO OTHER CO'S ARE ON THE SEARCH FOR TOPICS AND PEOPLE, WRITERS.
There are people in publs. That are enthusiastic and interested in this market.

THE IMPACT OF LATINO EXPLOSION JUST SENT OUT THE FLAG FOR CERTAIN PEOPLE TO REACT AND SAY, MAYBE THAT'S SOMETHING WE OUT TO CONSIDER.
What it did was say, oh there's an opportunity here. But it didn't say, this is how you take advantage of it.

The sales of a book in eng. By a Latino are exponentially larger than those of same book, same author in Spanish. A lot of that has to do with distribution; where does one go to buy a book in Spanish? Do people know that B&N and Borders carry books in Span? Most people who prefer to read and speak in Spanish do not know; they would not think to go to these places. First instinct would be to go to their country of origin on their annual visit, and come back with a suitcase full of books.

THAT'S ALWAYS BEEN THE CASE, AS FAR AS YOU CAN TELL?
As an industry, publishing is counter-intuitive. They expect the customer to find the product and they don't invest a great deal in getting the word out and getting the attn. Of the customer as to where it is. They don't get the product to the customer, expect the customer to find the product. They don't really advertise, don't do market research. So how do people know that you have a book out? And that's very unusual in the business situation.

FIND THE TALENT AND TRY TO EDUCATE THE TALENT ON THE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SIDE.
My mission is to encourage and enable aspiring Latino writers to pursue and fulfill their dreams of being happily published authors. Latino writer's conference took place in May and as far as I know, is the first national Latino writer's conference. It was the Latino writer's conference in Albuquerque in May, and I sent out an announcement; sponsored by the National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico, and that cultural center is the first and only national Hispanic center in the country; everything else is just Mexican or la Hispanic or new York. It's a gorgeous facility, have gotten tons of money from the government, and they have, a 700 hundred foot theatre, have the up to date library, flat screen TV.; amazing facility, TV, book signings there; they have cultural events. Like right now the Cheech Marin art show is right there, its beautiful.

My understanding is that book scan figures represent 70 percent of sales in the business; they reflect sales of B&N and Borders… Here is one comparison I will make: Up until 1992, people in book publishing thought Black people didn't read. That's because the sales figures of AA's for that time were very modest. But then Terry Macmillan published her third book, "Waiting to Exhale," and that was the first book by an AA that sold and you'll have to confirm this, that sold three quarters of a million copies in hardcover. And hardcovers only out for a year, at most two, before the paperback comes out; that's a lot of books, at a high price point. And Macmillan at that time is one of the bestselling AA authors. She was the first to sell at that level, so people in the pub. Industry said "oh my God black people do buy books. Lets publish more." And so there's been this renaissance. Now ten years later there's about 5 AA imprints run by and for black people that publish books for black people. Latinos have not had a Latina Terry Macmillan because our bestselling Latino author in the U.S. is Sandra Cisneros, and her book is House on Mango Street. But compare the sales figures. Macmillan: ¾ million copies in hardcover in the first year of its life. Cisneros: 2 million over the course of ten years, and the majority of those copies are sold in paperback, and a big percentage of those paperbacks are sold in the academic market, meaning that a high school teacher or college professor told students you have to go buy this book or not pass. That's different than having someone say, "Oh I read this book, you should read it," and someone buying it in hardcover because someone recommended it. So AA vs. Latino; the numbers say it all. Cisneros is our bestselling and is not in the same league as the AA.

In addition they have to pay money to market and promote it; probably a pretty penny. Keep that in mind; I think the first printing was about 125 copies; I haven't heard that its gone back to press. It's gone as high as 20 on the NY Times list. How many copies do you have to sell to make it there. My understanding is that you can sell, around the beginning of the war, I was told that a book was going to be number one on the NY Times bestselling list and it had sold less than 2,000 copies that week. Now the war is over, this was at beginning of war; but the economy is still bad. So, I cannot tell you how many copies the number one hardcover fiction book has sold in NY times this week or last week.

This is why we don't advertise; this is why you never see an ad on TV for a book; a 30 or 60 second spot on television costs what 100,000 dollars more. The typical marketing promo budget for a book could be hundreds maybe thousands of dollars including the postage for the mailing. You can't buy a lot of ads for a couple of hundred or a thousand dollars. And that's your budget for the year.

Oct-Nov-December; it was in the top ten; it sold less than 10,000 copies that week (??00:00 what she's talking about, book not named).