Ideas are not stories

In Tuesday’s Summer Series session on marketing, a writer asked how she could protect her idea at pitchfest. She was going to share it with agents and publishers and didn’t want them to steal it or give it to another writer.Interestingly, the same thing had JUST come up on an episode of Suits which Charlie is watching and I’m giving one ear/one eye to when I’m between songs on Spotify or stories on my kindle. In the episode, a writer wanted to sue the bookstore/publisher she worked for because she had shared an idea with her boss and her boss had shared the idea with an established author. That author then wrote the book and the publisher and store was selling the book. The writer, a clerk at the store, claimed she’d had other ideas that the publisher took as well.When the clerk first told the lawyer this story, I responded, “Write the book. The idea doesn’t count until it’s written.”Anyway, the story went on with the lawyer trying to help the clerk only to finally turn on her saying, that same idea could have been any one of these titles and present her with a stack of books. The point? Ideas are nothing. It’s the work of writing the actual story that counts.So, after delivering this same advice to the woman on the Summer Series session I said, “Have you written the book?” She said no. I said, “Don’t pitch. Don’t query. Go somewhere and write that book. Then query and pitch. No one pays for ideas. They pay for finished books.”Read more on the blog.