Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/30/13

Lots of links today! Here's a random song to start us off:

Pomplamoose: "Mister Sandman." Song ends about halfway through the video, but I like this version. : )

1. "Rising Action, Falling Interest." Sherwood Smith of Book View Cafe argues that too much literary analysis, too soon, can kill a person's chance of becoming a lifelong reader.

2. "How to make the most of being a noncelebrity author." Janet Kobobel Grant of Books & Such discusses the occasional need for pragmatic choices in a beginning author's career.

3. "What to do when an editor shows significant interest and other editors have the proposal." Rachel Kent, Books & Such. May we all have such a problem. Probably aimed mostly at nonfiction writers, since it's talking about proposals.

4. "8 Ways to Help Your Favorite Author* (*and Get Your Fans To Help YOU)." Another from Books & Such--this one by Rachelle Gardner. They have a really good blog, actually--I think they're a Christian agency, but most of their advice is universally applicable. Give them a look!

5. "How does an author handle multiple requests for 'exclusive reads'[?]" Again, may we all have such problems. This is a "Question Emporium" post by the inestimable Janet Reid.

6. "Should Writers 'JUST' Write?" By Dan Blank of Writer Unboxed. (Spoiler: The answer is "probably not.")

7. "Cover Art -- So Where's The Problem?" For those who came in late, Jim Hines sums it up.

8. "Girl Hood: On (not) Finding Yourself in Books." Jaquira Diaz of Her Kind on the importance of diversity in children's/YA literature.

9. "The Making of a Cover," by Zoë Marriott. This is SO COOL. I'm now having daydreams about someone doing this for my book.

10. "Where Kristin Discusses The Importance Of Metadata,"  by Agent Kristin of Pub Rants. The video quality isn't great, but this is definitely something to think about, especially for people who are interested in self-publishing.

For those of you wondering what the heck is metadata, these are the descriptive tags included in product description and in a lot of cases, embedded in the content file itself of electronic books, that allow a novel to be searchable and discoverable on distribution venues such as Amazon, BN, and Kobo.  

The overall gist is that flexibility and responsiveness are important here, as they always are in self-publishing (or publishing in general).

11. "A love letter to books that aren't exactly mine (or, why I love foreign rights)." By agent Molly Jaffa.

12. "25 Hard Truths About Writing And Publishing." I have mixed feelings about Chuck Wendig's blog style, but this is a good piece.

Sorry these were late! And happy birthday to my sister, thelisbet, who's 27 today. XOXO!

IllogiCon 2, Day 3

 Click here for Day 1, or here for Day 2.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Got there late, of course. The first panel I managed to attend was "Humanizing Villains," which started at 2. I came in at 2:15, and missed a lot of the discussion, but enjoyed what I was able to see. The panelists were Misty Massey, John Kessel, John Hartness, Natania Barron, Ada Milenkovic Brown, and Garth Graham.

On the Subject of Reviews (or, Goodreads and Me)

Over the past couple of years, there's been a lot of online discussion about whether it's appropriate for writers to post negative reviews--or even positive ones!--of other writers' work. A lot of people seemed to feel that it was unprofessional for writers to criticize other writers--like an artist publishing a critique of somebody else's painting, or a musician panning someone else's song. Because I aspired to publication myself, I decided to play it safe, and posted all of my reviews under an anonymous nickname.

Now that the book is almost finished, I've been thinking a lot about building my platform, and have been trying to link up all my online content so that people who are interested can find me in a lot of places. I've regretted a number of times that I couldn't link to my "anonymous" Goodreads account, both because I put a lot of thought into my reviews, and because reading is basically my primary interest. A lot of my friends are on Goodreads, and I love talking about the books I read. I'd love to widen the discussion by engaging with other fellow readers.

A few days ago, I decided to set up a secondary, "public" Goodreads page, where I could link my name to Five Stories for the Dark Months and any other ebooks I happened to publish. In the process, I accidentally linked the two accounts, and convinced myself for a few horrifying seconds that I had deleted my original account forever. When I finally figured out how to separate them (it was just a matter of disconnecting Facebook from the new account), I really became aware of how important my book reviews are to me, and how much I would have missed the interaction here if I had lost it. For that reason--and because I've always felt it was a teeny bit cowardly to keep my reviews hidden--I've decided to get rid of the secondary account, make the first account more or less public, and continue posting under my own full name.

Honesty is really important to me. If I feel strongly about something, then of course I want to express those feelings, even if they're negative. Since of course no one likes every book they read, there will necessarily be some negative reviews here--as there always have been. My personal book review policy (not to be confused with my movie review policy, wherein anything goes) is to be as kind and considerate to authors I haven't met as I would be to writers I meet in my writing group every two weeks. This means that, while I will not sugarcoat critiques, I will always do my best to refrain from snark. I will also be sure to highlight the good points even of books I find seriously problematic.

If you find a negative review of your work here, I know you're not going to be happy, but please understand that it isn't a personal attack. I know how much work goes into writing and editing a book, and I know that I have my blind spots just as everyone else has theirs. If you'd like to respond with a scathing critique of one of my own stories, then by all means go ahead--I could certainly use the publicity. : ) But I hope that, in the end, there will be no hard feelings from anything I post here, and that if we ever meet in person we can do so as friends.