Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 3/14/13

Random song of the week:

Steve Earle: "Copperhead Road"

This song came on the radio a few days ago, and I realized it was one of the first songs I ever  remembered hearing. My mom confirms that my dad bought it a few days after it came out (I would have been about five). If I were to make a playlist of songs illustrating important aspects of American culture, this one would be on it.

Links:

1. "SFWA De-Lists Hydra; Random House Responds." Drama! The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have decided that Random House's new e-imprint, Hydra, will not count as a qualifying market for SFWA membership. Random House feels they're being unfair. Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware reports at SFWA's website.

2. "Losing interest." Fantasy writer Patricia Wrede discusses some things that can make a writer want to abandon a story halfway through.

3. "Query Letter FAQs (Part II): 10 More Questions Answered." Chuck Sambuchino of Writer Unboxed gives some tips to writers approaching the dreaded query process.

4. "Omniscient." An interesting post by Ann Leckie on the rarely-discussed subject of third-person omniscient point of view. Worth reading!

5. "Why Not to Register Copyright for Unpublished Work." By Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware. Basically: it's probably a waste of time and money, and it might get you spammed by vanity presses. Those self-publishing, or publishing with small presses, on the other hand, should at least look into it. (Thanks as always, Ms. Strauss!)

6. "Publisher as Prestige Brand?" Wendy Lawton of Books & Such has an interesting speculation: that publishers are going to focus more and more on branding, creating recognizable consumer experiences like big design houses now do for fashion. Which I guess would put authors in the position of in-house designers? I don't know. It's odd to think about, but makes a certain amount of sense.

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 3/7/13

Thursday instead of Wednesday this week; sorry about that! Here's your random track of the day.

 "Delirium," Motion City Soundtrack. Language warning (one instance)

I am unfortunately super-way-behind again, so these are a couple of weeks old. I thought they were interesting, though!
 
1. "My First Year on Twitter: How I Became @erik_kwakkel." Medieval researcher Erik Kwakkel describes the development of his personal Tweeting style.

2. Peter Knapp of The Park Literary Group, LLC says that emotions and relationships are the key to writing a good pitch. Posted in preparation for WriteOnCon's Mid-Winter "Luck-o'-the-Irish" pitch fest.

3. "Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented." By Joshua Foer of The New Yorker (via Lilith Saintcrow) Very interesting!

4. "Author As Innovator: The Future of Publishing is Story, Not Technology." By Dan Blank of Writer Unboxed.

For writers, what this means is that innovation is in your hands. How will storytelling or publishing change? Stop looking to “the industry! the industry!” as Porter Anderson would call it, and begin creating it yourself.

 5. In this interview, Tumblr's Rachel Fershleiser gives some tips for organizing a successful book event. (By Togather)

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!

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/16/13

This week's random video: Did anyone know Christina Aguilera had done a duet with a country singer? Apparently the song's been out awhile, but I didn't hear it till Friday. I think it kind of works! I'm glad she still has a career--I always liked her.

 

Christina Aguilera/Blake Shelton: "Just a Fool"

1. "Don't Make Your Book Launch Like a Trip to the Dentist." Dan Blank of Writer Unboxed reminds authors to build their platforms well before the book is due to launch. 

"So how do we avoid this feeling, this panic of the drill in your mouth as you lead up to your book launch? At the most basic level, I would encourage you to answer these questions:

1. Describe to me, in detail what your ideal readers read in the last 12 months....
2. Where specifically can you go – online or off – to meet your readers?...
3. Who manages or organizes these places[?]"

2. "Got a cool idea for a story? Now break it." This is a fantastic post about plot creation by Hugh Howey, author of the Wool series, which I've heard incredible things about and need to read. Thanks to M. David Blake for the link.

3. "The wrong goodbye of Barnes and Noble." In the words of Cathy: "Ack!"

4. Autharium.  New ebook publishing platform; looks like they intend to compete with Smashwords. Some differences: According to the FAQ, it looks like they take about a 15% cut of what you earn from the various retailers (that's after the retailers take their cut). Also, it seems heavily skewed towards nonfiction--the fiction section doesn't even have genre divisions. Still, it's something to be aware of.

5. "9 Tips for Writing a Really Good 'Shitty First Draft.'" Lisa Cron of "Writer Unboxed" gives hints on how to produce a coherent story on the first try (rather than a Gordian knot that has to be cut to shreds and stitched together again before it makes any sense). My favorite tip is #7, the "third rail."

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Had a wonderful time at IllogiCon 2 this weekend, and saw a lot of good friends. What's everyone else been up to?

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.