A lot of my writing coach clients want to write a bestseller. Who doesn’t? When I ghostwrote The Legacy of Luna, a memoir about Julia “Butterfly” Hill’s two-plus year tree-sit in an ancient redwood to keep it from being chopped down, I had no idea that I would write a bestseller, let alone a national bestseller. I didn’t even know who Julia “Butterfly” was.
“How much would you charge me for a rewrite,” my great friend Liz Perle, then editor-at-large for HarperColins San Francisco and HarperColllins Publishers, asked over lunch. I had just moved to San Francisco to help care for my mother who had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. I no longer had the time to work as a freelance journalist waiting for article proposals to be accepted by magazines. I needed to make money during the eight hours when I wasn’t in the hospital with my mom or sleeping.
When I asked for more information about the book, Liz told me about Julia. Naturally I was intrigued, but no closer to being able to quote Liz a price for the book revision.
“Send me the manuscript and I’ll look it over,” I said.
“Liz messengered over a copy of the 50 pages the ghostwriter had just turned in. If the Unabomber had been an environmentalist, that’s what it would have sounded like. The chapters were unreadable. I called Liz that same night.
“You don’t need a rewrite. You’ve got nothing here.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m screwed.”
So I was brought on as ghostwriter #2.
It’s hard to imagine a much odder writing arrangement than having the “author” living in a tree and the ghostwriter spending half her waking hours in a hospital room, but we made it work better than either one of us ever imagined. Despite a fear of heights triggered by vertigo, I even climbed up the tree after a fair amount of prompting to visit with Julia in person for an afternoon. But I digress.
We had just ten weeks to pump out The Legacy of Luna. We actually made our deadline, producing a book that didn’t require us to make a single change.
How does all this apply to those of you who want to write a bestseller? Let’s start with what I tell my writing coach clients:
Don’t talk about it. Just write. Do whatever you can before, during and after the writing process to develop your platform (your ready-made readership that will want to buy your book). Then market, market, market. Those ingredients, along with a lot of luck, create a bestseller.
Now let’s look at how Julia “Butterfly” Hill followed this how to write a bestseller formula.
She didn’t ever talk about wanting a bestseller. She just knew she had something to say that she wanted to share with the world. So she found a writer, since she knew she couldn’t do the job.
When the first approach failed, she went along with a version of the book that was far different than the one she had originally conceived and agreed to a different writer.
She opened up during the interview process, which allowed me to craft a completely new outline, which Liz, the editor, and I then refined together.
Even though Julia couldn’t understand why anyone would be interested in how she went to the bathroom in a tree–or any other personal details about her life–she accepted what amounted to writing coach advice about what the content of each chapter. Then she talked out each chapter into a tape recorder while zipped into her sleeping bag late at night, since that was the only time she had available to work on the project.
How could a young woman living alone on a 100-foot platform in a tree be so busy?
Julia turned the tree into a media station, using her platform in the redwood to create a marketing platform. Then she made the most of that by doing unending radio interviews that aired around the world. By the time she came down to earth more than two years after she had initially climbed the tree for what was supposed to be a three-day stay, she was a celebrity. Thereafter, she continued to spread the environmental word through public speaking.
In short, without even realizing what she was doing, Julia adhered precisely to the book-writing-positioning-and-marketing formula.
May you do the same and experience the same success. Now go and write a bestseller.
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