Publetariat

Can We All Just Behave?

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This post by Maryann Miller originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 3/25/15.

Last month here at The Blood-Red Pencil I wrote about moral and ethical lines that we writers need to consider before we cross them just to make a buck. We had a great discussion about what we are comfortable writing, as well as our responsibility to consider what we’re contributing to society with our work.

One of our regular BRP contributors, Diana Hurwitz, had this to say on the topic:

Stories have the power to shape the collective consciousness. You can write with brutal honesty about what has happened and what could happen without suggesting that it should happen. Your work has a slant – perhaps a subliminal one. As a writer, you should at least be aware of the message you send and make sure it is the one you intended.

How we use our words is indeed important, and it is also important to consider how we act as professional writers. Addressing that need to always put a professional foot forward, was an interesting article on Writer Unboxed, written by Katharine Grubb. She asked some ethical questions that focus  on how writers present themselves and handle business dealings, such as:

 

Read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

How You Can Create Your Own Lucky Breaks as a Writer

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This post by Holly Robinson originally appeared on her site on 3/30/15.

I was walking with my kids on the beach when my father-in-law leaned over the balcony to shout, “Your agent’s on the phone! He has a book deal!”

Was that my lucky break as a novelist? Not exactly. Remember Hillary Clinton’s concession speech after losing her presidential bid? She said that, although she hadn’t broken through the glass ceiling, “it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.” Crossing the threshold from unpublished to published author was a similar journey for me: I had to keep pounding on that door until, one crack at a time, it gave way. There was no one lucky break. It was more like a hundred of them.

You, too, can publish your work, if you’re willing to make your own lucky breaks as a writer:

 

1. Write. Rewrite. Repeat.
Whether you’re intent on traditional or indie publishing, that manuscript had better be polished until it gleams.

 

2. Find contests to keep you writing—and on deadline.
My first lucky break was a local area arts festival that was running a writing contest. I had just read an essay by Joyce Maynard in Redbook magazine, something about dating after divorce, and I was inspired to write an essay about my own divorce called “My Two Husbands,” revealing how important it was to me that my first husband was still part of my life even after I’d remarried. I entered the essay in that local literary contest and, when it won Honorable Mention, I had the nerve to send it to Ladies’ Home Journal magazine. They bought it, and my career as a magazine writer was launched. My experience as a nonfiction writer allowed me to develop discipline, hone my writing skills and begin building a platform as a writer. And guess what? By the time my first novel was published, my editor at Ladies’ Home Journal had become the books editor. She reviewed the novel in their pages as a “great summer read” and helped boost my book sales—which helped me land a contract for my next novel.

 

Read the full post on Holly Robinson’s site.

 

Navigating the Forest of Feedback: 8 Ways to Recognize Helpful Criticism (and How to Ignore the Rest)

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This post by Elizabeth Law originally appeared on her Elizabeth Law Reads site on 3/5/15.

Recently, on a flight home from vacation, I met author Randi Hutter Epstein and we we were talking about her work. She said “After about three days of writing, I don’t know if what I have is good, or crap. I’ll ask anyone their opinion!”

Exactly.

If you’re a writer you need feedback, whether you’re a novice or an author with 30 books under your belt. And there are a lot of people out there who are only too happy to give it to you. But how do you know what comments are useful, anyway? What should you take, and what should you toss? Here are some good things to consider when asking for, or getting, feedback:

#1) What are my manuscript reviewer’s credentials and experience?
Has he published books for the same age category as I’m writing for? Or is she perhaps less far along in the process, but still experienced in reading and listening to manuscripts, and in giving thoughtful feedback? Maybe he is at the same place as I am and we can learn together?

Because you don’t need to hire an experienced editor to get good feedback.  For example, critique groups probably help their members more with their works in progress than any other class, editor or method out there.  But do keep in mind who is telling you things.  If they are fellow writers, do you admire or like their work? Do they share your ability to learn and grow?   Or are they one of those types who seem to have all the answers, until you find out they’ve never actually published anything?

 

Read the full post on Elizabeth Law Reads.

 

The Author Platform – You Definitely Need One and It Should Have Been Started Yesterday

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This post by Karen Cioffi originally appeared on The Working Writer’s Club on 3/28/15.

Did you ever hear the expression, “a stitch in time saves nine?”

Whether you’re an author or freelance writer, that’s how you need to think of your writing platform. Get it started first, as the foundation of your business. It’s much more effective than trying to play catch-up.

If you’re an author, your platform needs to be in place before you hit the submissions road (if you’re going the traditional route). And, it certainly needs to be in place before you self-publish.

If you’re a freelance writer, you need to have an effective website and marketing strategies in place before you offer your services online.

To reinforce this thought, let me tell you about my father. He was in construction – he built homes. The first thing that gets done, after the blueprints are drawn, is digging for the foundation. Then the foundation is created. Then the house is built on top of the foundation.

It’s the same when building an online platform. Getting a website is the digging part; the added content and optimization of the website is the foundation of your platform.

 

Read the full post on The Working Writer’s Club.

 

5 Cheeky Tips For Bloggers Embarking On The A-Z Challenge

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This post by Tara Sparling originally appeared on her blog on 3/31/15.

April is a month when thousands of bloggers embark on what’s called the The A-Z Challenge: where people blog on 26 near-consecutive days (every day except Sundays) – on a theme of their choice. It’s a fantastic exercise. It can get the blog blood flowing, prodding bloggers either out of a pit, or into a routine; and it’s a sure-fire way to either increase your audience, or get one in the first place.

Well, I’m not doing it. You’ll thank me later, when you realise how much blogging content increases next month, that I’m not going to be adding to it. I’ll be slow blogging as usual, but reading and cheering all challenge participants loudly from the sidelines.

And yet I’m going to do one bolshie post on this whole lark anyway. How dare she make pronouncements when she’s not even participating, you cry!

Because it never stopped me before, that’s why.

And so, as I sharpen my mouse in readiness to click on the content of others, here are a few tips from one of the people who might be reading you in April.

1. Use the opportunity to do something you wouldn’t usually do.

 

Read the full post, which includes further elaboration on the first tip plus four more tips, on Tara Sparling’s blog.

 

Friday Five: Discworld's 5 Best Supporting Characters

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This post by Graeme Neill originally appeared on Pornokitsch on 3/27/15.

The warmth of tributes to Terry Pratchett’s passing – from Neil Gaiman’s sadness at the death of a friend to Nick Harkaway’s exploration of his comedic chops – showed just how loved he was. Broadly ignored by critics and awards, Pratchett was content to write deeply intelligent, complex and hilarious novels that sold and were adored in their millions. I’m sure he coped.

I loved Pratchett as a teen before stupidly putting him to one side for ‘Grown Up’ books. For the past six months I have been making up for my teenage idiocy by reading the Discworld from the start and writing about each book in publication order here. Because Pratchett was the line that links my childhood reading with what I love as an adult. It was time I started looking at that.

There is a myriad of things to love about Discworld but among the best is how it feels like a real place. Even his supporting characters are written with a care and attention that demonstrates his strength as a writer. By way of tribute to Pratchett and his Discworld, I want to put the spotlight on my favourite background players.

1. Cheery Littlebottom

First on the list is easy. It’s CSI: Ankh-Morpork. Cheery is a dwarven forensic expert first seen in Feet of Clay, a character we quickly learn is a woman. Female dwarves have beards and adhere to masculine cultural rules. Sex is, well, confusing. Cheery’s exploration of her femininity, experimenting with heels, make-up and jewellery, could be played for quite offensive laughs.

Pratchett is much better than that. Why Feet of Clay is an amazing book, one of his best, is that it’s about acts of rebellion, from the golem who cannot cope with gaining its own agency and murders as a result, to Vimes, Captain of the City Watch, who refuses to let his butler shave him. Through Cheery looking to break the gender roles dictated to her and the emotional and societal difficulties she faces in doing so, Pratchett humanises the golem’s own struggle and makes the book that much more complex and better as a consequence.

 

Read the full post on Pornokitsch.

 

10 Things Freelance Editors Shouldn’t Do for You

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This post by Lynette Labelle originally appeared on her blog on 2/17/15.

I’ve talked about readers’ expectations and agents’ expectations, but what about writers’ expectations when it comes to hiring a freelance editor? Of course, you’ll want her to be professional, knowledgeable, courteous, respectful, etc. But there are a few things that people have asked me over the years that tell me they don’t really know what to expect from a freelance editor.

Freelance editors won’t (or shouldn’t):

 

-Submit your manuscript to agents or publishers: We can help you improve the work, but it’s up to you to approach agents and publishers with a polished manuscript and hook them.

 

-Guarantee your book will sell after we’ve edited it: Again, we can help you improve the work, but we don’t know how much (if any) of our suggestions you’ve implemented. We don’t know what an agent or publisher is looking for at any particular time or what’s hot in the market. I follow agents’ blogs and industry articles, so I have an idea of what’s selling and what’s not, but this business is very subjective and the market is constantly changing. Agents meet with editors (online or in person) on a regular basis to get to know them and their personal tastes. Freelance editors don’t.

 

Read the full post on Lynette Labelle’s blog.

 

Fuck You, Clean Reader: Authorial Consent Matters

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 3/25/15. Note that it contains a lot of strong language, but as strong language and authorial consent are at the heart of this post we have not censored any of it in the title or excerpt here.

There exists a new app called Clean Reader.

The function of Clean Reader is to scrub the profanity from e-books.

Their tagline: “Read books. Not profanity.“

You can dial in how much of the profanity you want gone from the books.

Author Joanne Harris has roundly (and to my mind, correctly) condemned the app, and I would recommend you read about her and condemnation. I would further suggest you go on and read the email she received from the Clean Reader people and, more importantly, her response to that email. (Oh, also: check her tweets, too: @JoanneChocolat.)

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:

Fuck you, Clean Reader.

*cups hand to mouth*

Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.

*fuckecho through the canyon of fucks*

Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.

Let me unpack this a little.

When I write a book, I write it a certain way. I paint with words. Those words are chosen. They do not happen randomly. The words and sentences and paragraphs are the threads of the story, and when you pluck one thread from the sweater, the whole thing threatens to unravel — or, at least, becomes damaged. You may say, Well, Mister Wendig, surely your books do not require the profanity, to which I say, fuck you for thinking that they don’t. If I chose it, and the editor and I agree to keep it, then damn right it’s required. It’s no less required than a line of dialogue, or a scene of action, or a description of a goddamn motherfucking lamp. Sure, my book could exist without that dialogue, that action, that goddamn motherfucking lamp.

But I don’t want it to. That’s your book, not my book.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?

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This essay by Louis Menand originally appeared on The New Yorker on 6/8/09.

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers. People who take creative-writing workshops get course credit and can, ultimately, receive an academic degree in the subject; but a workshop is not a course in the normal sense—a scene of instruction in which some body of knowledge is transmitted by means of a curricular script. The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

This skepticism is widely shared, and one way for creative-writing programs to handle it is simply to concede the point. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it. “The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” the Iowa Web site explains. Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.”

 

Read the full essay on The New Yorker.

 

Deadly Proof–Anatomy of a Book Launch

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This post by M. Lousia Locke originally appeared on her blog on 2/21/15.

I am proud to announce that Deadly Proof, the fourth book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series, is now available for sale (see links below).

As with the other three novels in this series, Deadly Proof finds Annie Fuller and her beau, Nate Dawson, investigating a crime that will lead them (and the reader) into an exploration of the lives of working women in the late 19th century—in this case women who held jobs in the printing industry.

If you read my last two posts on my marketing strategy for 2015, you will know that I decided to take all my full-length books out of KDP Select and upload them everywhere and make the first book perma-free. My hope was that this strategy would provide a fertile field for this newly published book. So far, my hopes have been realized.

First of all, Maids of Misfortune, the perma-free book, is still being downloaded at a nice pace, making it highly visible in the popularity lists on Amazon and on the free lists in the iBook and Barnes and Noble stores, and I can see sell-through going on. The sales of the second book in the series, Uneasy Spirits, and now the third, Bloody Lessons, have been increasing each week. And now, some of these new fans of the series should be just about ready to  try this new book.

Second, while more complicated than back in the day when I only had to upload my books on Amazon, the process of uploading Deadly Proof for publication in multiple online stores was quite easy since I had recently gone through the process for my other novels and my short story collection.

 

Read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

From the Internet to the Ivy League: Fanfiction in the Classroom

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This post by Elizabeth Minkel originally appeared on The Millions on 3/25/15.

It’s starting to feel like spring the morning that the Dinky, the shuttle that runs between Princeton Junction and Princeton University, deposits us on the edge of campus. There’s still plenty of snow on the ground, but the students milling past us are ambitiously channeling summer, bare arms and legs, flip flops and black and orange athletic gear. We’ve cut the timing a bit close, so my friend and I are frantically checking every single map on the path to East Pyne Hall, the site of our 12:30 class, English 222. The official course title is “Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock” — essentially, a class I’d have given anything for as an undergrad.

To some extent, fanfiction has always had a place in the English classroom. The history of literature is one of reworking and retelling stories, especially prior to our modern conception of authorship. Popular media narratives often portray fan fiction — using someone else’s books, TV shows, films, or real-life personas, among other things, as the starting point for original fiction — as cringe-worthy scenes of sentimentality and/or sex between superheroes or vampires or all five members of a certain floppy-haired boy band. I and plenty of others have worked to ground the historically marginalized practice in “literary” precedent — favorite examples of authors explicitly refashioning others’ works include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, both of which I first studied in a classroom.

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study

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This post by Brenda Miller originally appeared on Brevity on 1/17/15.

I often teach classes on the form of the “hermit crab” essay, a term Suzanne Paola and I used in our textbook Tell It Slant. Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as the container for the writing at hand, such as the essay in the form of a “to-do” list, or a field guide, or a recipe. Hermit crabs are creatures born without their own shells to protect them; they need to find empty shells to inhabit (or sometimes not so empty; in the years since I’ve begun using the hermit crab as my metaphor, I’ve learned that they can be quite vicious, evicting the shell’s rightful inhabitant by force).

When I teach the hermit crab essay class, we begin by brainstorming the many different forms that exist for us to plunder for our own purposes. Once we have such a list scribbled on the board, I ask the students to choose one form at random and see what kind of content that form suggests. This is the essential move: allowing form to dictate content. By doing so, we get out of our own way; we bypass what our intellectual minds have already determined as “our story” and instead become open and available to unexpected images, themes and memories. Also, following the dictates of form gives us creative nonfiction writers a chance to practice using our imaginations, filling in details, and playing with the content to see what kind of effects we can create.

I’ve taught the hermit crab class many, many times over the years, in many different venues. So, often it’s tempting for me to sit out the exercise; after all, what else could I possibly learn? But after just a minute, it becomes too boring to watch other people write, so I dive in myself, with no expectation that I’ll write anything “good.” In one class, I glanced at the board we had filled with dozens of forms. And my eye landed on “rejection notes.” So that is where I began:

 

Read the full post on Brevity.

 

Socially Awkward: A Simple Guide to Social Media

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This post by Jandra Sutton with Steph Rodriguez originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 3/20/15.

Chances are you’ve read countless articles about the best ways to use social media outlets, like Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, or LinkedIn, and devoured list after list of quick-tips—even “for dummies”—at an attempt to implement a wealth of information with varying degrees of success. It’s great that you’re using social media, but that’s only one part of the equation. You’ve already mastered all the basics to be accepted by the social media in-crowd: “like,” “share,” “tweet.” Yet, what about the things you should avoid at the risk of becoming a social media outcast? By following these simple guidelines to online etiquette, even the most socially awkward computer user will roam the halls of social media with much success.

 

Tasteful Self-Promotion by Online Appeal

Facebook and Twitter are perfect outlets to express a variety of thoughts and experiences like: how great the bike ride to work was, photographs of a tasty dish from that new, swanky restaurant in town, an interesting article you read, or even as a means to self-promote your brand or new novel.

Still, as a general rule, only 1 out of 5 posts should be blatantly self-promotional, like those including a link to buy your book. The other four, leave open to share a new blog post, comment on a topic relevant to your book, ask followers a question that interests them, or retweet that insightful article you read over the weekend. Flesh out your social media pages with more than just attempts to sell. This will further engage your loyal followers.

 

Read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

Splat Goes the Hero: Visceral Horror

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This essay by Jack Ketchum originally appeared on LitReactor on 5/2/12.

I wrote a book a while back called The Girl Next Door which opened with the line, “You think you know about pain?” Personally I’m no expert so far–knock on wood–though as a kid I had my share of broken bones and various other less than delightful body-surprises over the years: a cortisone shot into an inflamed tendon, my upper jaw peeled and scraped — did you know that pain can be a sound? — and a fall, stark naked, through the branches of a tree that left me looking like something out of 100 Days of Sodom. (Curious about that one? Too bad. You’ll have to wait for the story.)

But the point is that if you’re writing about violence, you’re writing about pain. Somebody’s pain. Maybe not yours but somebody’s. And my preference is to face it squarely. As honestly as possible and very much up close and personal.

I’ve noted this elsewhere but it bears repeating here: the great director Akira Kurosawa once said that the role of the artist is to not look away.
That pretty much defines what I try to do. There are plenty of ways to look away and bad writers at some point have found all of them. We’ll get to some of the more disastrous ways later but right now let’s just stick to violence.

Remember those old Hays-Office-era cowboy movies where everything is completely bloodless, where people get shot with a rifle that would stop a bear for god’s sake and fall down and die as neatly as Baryshnikov executes a tour j’ete?  Then along came Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch and blew all that away forever.  A little later, horror movies kicked some dirt over the grave.

 

Read the full essay on LitReactor.

 

Which Bad Novel Is Perfect for You?

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This post by Katy Waldman originally appeared on Slate on 3/18/15. While authors who are interested in exploring the possibilities of the Kindle Scout program may find the article’s tone dismissive or even inflammatory, it provides some solid insight into the reader’s-eye-view.

Reading, and voting on, the books of Amazon’s new Kindle Scout program.

As the title of one of the new century’s most beloved novels reminds us, complexity can exist where we see only the absence of complication. A single color contains multitudes. That novel’s author, E.L. James, might have been commenting on the category to which her own work belongs: “bad” books. Fifty Shades of Grey is a bad book—cheesy, boilerplate, and silly, despite its silky dreams of sophistication and naughtiness. But man, the simple descriptor bad encompasses so many other vistas of badness, strange and terrible to behold. These are planets of implausibility and awfulness that revolve beyond our wildest imaginings.

Welcome to Kindle Scout.

Kindle Scout is a new initiative from Amazon, a “reader-powered” publishing platform for “new, never-before-published books.” It works like this: Authors submit their manuscripts, 5,000-word excerpts of which are posted on the website for a 30-day scouting period. During that time, Amazon members can browse the selections and nominate the ones they’d like to see published. A reader is allowed just three swappable picks at a time, to preserve the integrity of each recommendation. At the end of the trial run, a team of staffers tallies the nods, applying its own secret rubric to decide which manuscripts get released. (A Kindle Scout representative declined to elaborate on the criteria it uses.) Selected books, explains Amazon, “will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50 percent eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”

On the writer’s resource site Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss has a smart post assessing the authorial incentives and drawbacks of such a deal.

 

Read the full post on Slate.