Publetariat

Alabama Investigating Possible Elder Abuse In Connection With Harper Lee’s New Novel

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This article by Sarah Kaplan originally appeared on The Washington Post on 3/12/15.

The news last month that Harper Lee would be publishing a second book was met with a brief blip of exultation followed by skepticism from fans of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Why would the 88-year-old author, a woman so publicity-averse she once compared herself to the reclusive Boo Radley from her novel, have agreed to the publication of a “Mockingbird” predecessor she tabled more than 50 years ago?

Many concluded that Lee, who resides in an assisted-living facility and is said to be in declining health, could not have knowingly consented to a new novel, entitled “Go Set a Watchman.”

Now, the New York Times reported Wednesday night, at least one complaint about potential elder abuse has been filed, and Alabama state officials are investigating the claims.

The Times report said investigators for the state’s Human Resources Department and the Alabama Securities Commission, tasked with preventing financial fraud against the elderly, interviewed Lee last month. They also spoke to employees of the facility where she lives, as well as to several friends.

 

Read the full article on The Washington Post.

 

Episodic Fiction is Finding a New Home on Kindle Unlimited

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on GoodEReader on 3/11/15.

Indie authors are disrupting e-book publishing by writing episodic fiction. They are primarily distributing the titles through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle lending library. This is providing a financial boon to authors who write 60 page novels in a serialized manner. This method of writing is quickly becoming more profitable than simply writing a single feature length novel.

Serialized fiction first gained prominence in Victorian England and it first appeared in newspapers. It was practiced by such literary giants as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. It fell out of favor in the last fifty years, but is now making a rebound, thanks to Amazon.

Things have been fairly static in self-publishing and traditional publishing for decades. An author writes a book and has it distributed through specific sales channels. They promote a single title and get paid when readers purchase it. Now we have Amazon picking up the tab when a book is read and the reader pays virtually nothing.

The Kindle Lending Library was first established in 2011 and allows members who opt into Amazon Prime to read one free book a month. This has proven to be a lucrative method for indie authors to garner sales. Kindle Unlimited is a similar program, but instead of a Prime membership, users pay around $10.00 a month and read as many e-books they want.

 

Read the full post on GoodEReader.

 

The Utility (and Trappings) of the Novel Outline

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This post by Jamie Kornegay originally appeared on Writer’s Digest on 2/12/15.

I’ve been selling books for more than fifteen years and learning to write novels even longer. Of all the author readings and Q&A sessions I’ve hosted (and attended), one of the most common questions among beginning writers, even curious readers, is this: Do you start with an outline?

You’ve heard the pros and cons. An outline helps organize your thoughts and prevents you from spinning your wheels and traveling down dead-end storylines. The flipside, of course, is that constructing an outline boxes you in and limits the possibility of discovery, which is the most creative and rewarding part of writing.

First, it’s important to note that there are no ironclad rules to novel writing. Every writer works differently and stumbles upon his or her preferred method through trial and error. The novel, rather than writing advisers, should tell you what it needs.

The traditional term paper outline, with its Roman numerals and letters, is helpful to organize a finite amount of information, but a novel is more amorphous. I couldn’t begin to collect a novel’s potential in an outline, though I certainly understand the impulse. There’s something terrifying about the blank page and its stark white emptiness. What could you put there that anyone would want to read?

 

Read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

 

Manuscript Pitch Websites: Do Literary Agents Use Them?

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This post by Victoria Strauss originally appeared on Writer Beware on 3/10/15.

Last week, a writer contacted me to ask about WriterPitch.com,”a website that blends the worlds of literary agents and writers under one roof.”

How?

For Writers:
You’ll have the ability to have your pitch/pitches read by hundreds of literary agents. With the click of a button an agent can request your manuscript and instantly an email will be sent to you as well as a notice to your homepage….

For Agents:
As an agent you’ll have the ability to search through pitches by specific genres. With the click of a button a request of materials will be sent to any pitch you like, this request letter will be completely customized by you as a field in your personal profile.

The question the writer wanted to ask me was whether WriterPitch’s Terms and Conditions posed a problem, specifically the User Content clause:

You grant to WriterPitch.com a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your user content in any existing or future media. You also grant to WriterPitch.com the right to sub-license these rights, and the right to bring an action for infringement of these rights.

I told her that this language was not ideal–it’d be preferable if the license were limited to operation of the service–but that it’s also very common. You’ll find similar language on just about any website that accepts user content. It’s not intended to enable the site to rip off users’ intellectual property, but to allow the site to operate online.

Such language is a concern, and if you’re going to participate in a website whose Terms include it, you need to understand it and its implications. With WriterPitch, however, there’s a much more pressing question.

Will agents use it?

 

Read the full post, which includes many direct Twitter replies from literary agents, on Writer Beware.

 

The Ultimate Guide to Finding Images for Book Promotion

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This post by Dana Lynn Smith originally appeared on her The Savvy Book Marketer site on 2/11/15.

When someone lands on your website, book sales page or social post, you may get only a fraction of a second to capture their attention before they decide to move on. Photos and illustrations (along with strong headlines) are key to drawing the eye and breaking up large blocks of text to make it more inviting.

Carefully selected images can also convey a sense of the message contained in the text, but sometimes bloggers choose beautiful or whimsical images to capture the reader’s attention. (I ran across this gnome image while working on this article and just couldn’t resist!)

 

Copyright Concerns
Like our writing, the work of photographers and illustrators is protected by copyright. The creators of photos and illustrations can choose to make their work available to others through various types of licenses that govern how and where the images can be used and how they are compensated.

It doesn’t make sense to buy an image for every blog post or social post, but it can be a challenge to find images at no charge. Following are some tips for finding and using images in your book promotion.

Creative Commons Licenses
Many images are available free under a “Creative Commons License”. Although there is no charge for using the image, there may be restrictions on how it’s used and you may be required to give credit to the creator. See the bottom of this page for an explanation of various types of creative commons licenses.

Here are two sources of free creative commons images:

 

Read the full post on The Savvy Book Marketer.

 

The Delivered Story; The Interpreted Story

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This post by David Baboulene originally appeared on his The Science of Story blog on 1/20/15.

Whenever you absorb a story, you are actually experiencing *two* stories. Or at least, two versions of the same story. This is well accepted in academia, and was first documented by the Russian Formalists in the 1920s, (Victor Shlovsky, Vladmir Propp et al) who called the first version the Syuzhet and the second version the Fabula. Great words, but let me try to simplify it to what can help a writer deliver better story today.

The first version is the delivered story. All the tangible sensory stimulation you receive from having the story communicated to your eyes and ears. So, in a film, this includes the music, images, dialogue, action, character behaviours, the poster, the trailer, the reviews you read, the blog-post, your knowledge of the star’s personal life – everything that contributes to what you think about the story.

In a book, of course, the written words are the total sensory stimulation. Here is, allegedly, the shortest novel ever written:

“For Sale. Baby’s Shoes. Never Worn.”

In this case, the total delivered story is just those six words (and whatever else you might overlay if you know it was (allegedly) written by Ernest Hemingway).

 

Read the full post on The Science of Story.

 

Five "Show Don't Tell" Danger Zones

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This post by Diana Hurwitz originally appeared on The Blood Red Pencil on 3/5/15.

Showing is illustrated through actions and interiority rather than the author telling us how the character is reacting and behaving.

Telling often involves adverbs and adjectives. Look for bland descriptive words like: attractive, dumb, embarrassing, fabulous, fascinating, handsome, hilarious, mad, powerful, pretty, smart, stunning, stupid, tired, and ugly. Telling is fertile ground for clichés. Make it fresh.

Here are five danger zones to watch out for.

 

1. Action: Don’t tell us what a character does; describe what constitutes the action.

Telling: Dick worked hard.

Showing: Dick wiped the sweat from his face with his sleeve. He lifted the axe and swung: thunk, swipe, thunk. The chunk of wood sheared into small pieces. Each blow reverberated through his shoulders and back.

Telling: Jane walked quickly through the aisles, tossing in items without looking at them.

 

Read the full post on The Blood Red Pencil.

 

Your Book’s Genre and Classification Matter

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This post by Bob Hughes originally appeared on Beneath the Cover on 3/5/15.

For many novelists, the genre of their work matters a great deal. Even if there’s an element of fantasy in their work, they dread that it be labeled as something less than their ideal, as you can see from a New York Times interview with the acclaimed British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), concerning his new novel, “The Buried Giant.”

He asks the Times reporter Alexandra Alter, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

A fantasy novel from a serious novelist! Oh, no. It shouldn’t matter for a writer as acclaimed as Ishiguro. But it does. Even though so-called literary novelists as celebrated as David Mitchell have explored fantasy in their work (such as Mitchell’s latest, “The Bone Clocks”), critics of literary fiction tend to look down on fantasy as a serious art form, despite the literary success of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin.

 

Read the full post on Beneath the Cover.

 

The Weird Agonies And Little-Known Science Of Wordnesia

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This article by Matthew J.X. Malady originally appeared on Slate on 3/4/15.

One hour and seven minutes into the decidedly hit-or-miss 1996 comedy Black Sheep, the wiseass sidekick character played by David Spade finds himself at an unusually pronounced loss for words. While riding in a car driven by Chris Farley’s character, he glances at a fold-up map and realizes he somehow has become unfamiliar with the name for paved driving surfaces. “Robes? Rouges? Rudes?” Nothing seems right. Even when informed by Farley that the word he’s looking for is roads, Spade’s character continues to struggle: “Rowds. Row-ads.” By this point, he’s become transfixed. “That’s a total weird word,” he says, “isn’t it?”

Now, it’s perhaps necessary to mention that, in the context of the film, Spade’s character is high off nitrous oxide that has leaked from the car’s engine boosters. But never mind that. Row-ad-type word wig outs similar to the one portrayed in that movie are things that actually happen, in real life, to people with full and total control over their mental capacities. These wordnesias sneak up on us at odd times when we’re writing or reading text.

Here’s how they work: Every now and again, for no good or apparent reason, you peer at a standard, uncomplicated word in a section of text and, well, go all row-ads on it. If you’re typing, that means inexplicably blanking on how to spell something easy like cake or design. The reading version of wordnesia occurs when a common, correctly spelled word either seems as though it can’t possibly be spelled correctly, or like it’s some bizarre combination of letters you’ve never before seen—a grouping that, in some cases, you can’t even imagine being the proper way to compose the relevant term.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

Do Publishers Deserve to Exist?

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This post by Peter Ginna originally appeared on his Dr. Syntax blog on 10/24/15.

This week’s screed against book publishers comes from Matt Yglesias at Vox.com, who proclaims, “Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers”–a headline that shouts clickbait but fairly reflects his piece. Yglesias, whose work I have often admired, notes that he’s the child of two authors and has published a book himself, so his hatred seems to be honestly earned. Writing of the “fundamental uselessness” of publishers, he says they are going to be “wiped off the face of the earth soon” by Amazon “and readers will be better for it.”

Book-business types rolled their eyes at Yglesias’ hostile tone and ignorance of some key facts, but I saw it cited as smart and “thoughtful” by a number of media people and others who I’d have hoped would know better. So at the risk of repeating points that have been made many times before (but seem still to be widely un-apprehended), maybe it’s worth briefly reminding ourselves just how publishers do add value in connecting writers and readers. So, pace Matt Yglesias, here are some of the services publishers perform.

Curation. The function of choosing what work is most worth presenting to readers is derided by some as a retrograde, “elitist” notion. Why should publishers appoint themselves as selectors of what people ought to read, when everybody can put their work online and let readers judge for themselves?

 

Read the full post on Dr. Syntax.

 

Once Upon a Time…

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This post by Lee Kofman originally appeared on Writers Victoria on 1/20/15.

The beginning of yet another year makes me think about other beginnings – those first pages, paragraphs, sentences, words that pull readers into our tales. How do we make them sing?

Most obviously, banality is the enemy of good writing. Yet in many openings of published and unpublished works I read clichés creep in, often because of the current fashion to begin stories mid-scene, where characters are ‘doing’ something. Such an opening can be effective of course, yet scene-writing – with its focus on the action – lends itself to clichés. How many books begin with someone staring out of the window at a meadow, or running for their lives, or tracing something cool with their finger? We can get away more easily with such descriptions in the middle, but to entice intelligent strangers to stick with our stories we need to work harder.

Think of this beginning:

‘In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”’

This is the opening of ‘The Great Gatsby’, hailed by some critics as ‘the perfect novel’. Here we are at once plunged not into the action, but into the mind of the narrator who confides something urgent to us, thereby immediately creating intimacy with the readers. Moreover, this start hints at a dramatic narrative to do with moral dilemmas around our tendency to both judge and empathise, and the problem of social inequality. In short, these first sentences suggest that this novel is going to be one of substance, and do so without pomposity. This suggestion is conveyed by the measured voice of a sympathetic narrator.

 

Read the full post on Writers Victoria.

 

The Myth of the Unearned Advance

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This post by Steve Laube originally appeared on his The Steve Laube Agency blog on 6/13/11.

A common myth permeating the industry is that a book is not profitable if the author’s advance does not earn out. I would like to attempt to dispel this myth.

First let’s define the term “Advance.” When a book contract is created between a publisher and an author, the author is usually paid an advance. This is like getting an advance against your allowance when you were a kid. It isn’t an amount that is in addition to any future earnings from the sale of the book. Instead, like that allowance, it is money paid in advance against all future royalties, and it must therefore be covered by royalty revenue (i.e. earned out) before any new royalty earnings are paid.

The advance is usually determined by a series of assumptions that the publisher makes with regard to the projected performance of each title. The publisher hopes/plans that the book will earn enough royalty revenue to cover the advance within the first year of sales.

A NY Times essay a couple years ago casually claimed “the fact that 7 out of 10 titles do not earn back their advance.” Of course they did not cite a source for that “fact.” But I have seen it quoted so often is must be true! (and it isn’t.) The implication then is that a book isn’t profitable if it doesn’t earn out its advance. The publisher overpaid and has lost money. The author is the happy camper who is counting their cash gleefully celebrating the failure of their publisher to project sales correctly.
– See more at: http://www.stevelaube.com/the-myth-of-the-unearned-advance/#sthash.NsjuD9CI.dpuf

 

Read the full post on The Steve Laube Agency blog.

27 Free Writing Contests: Legitimate Competitions With Cash Prizes

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This post by Kelly Gurnett originally appeared on The Write Life on 2/16/15.

When I was about 12, I saw an ad in a magazine for a poetry contest that sounded fancy and impressive, something like “International Library of Poetry.” I bled poetry at that age, so I crossed my fingers and sent in a poem I’d been slaving over for weeks.

And, lo and behold, the people behind the contest quickly wrote back to tell me my poem had been selected as a winner!

I was speechless with honor. Of the thousands of poets who must have submitted to the contest — no doubt many of them adults much wiser and more skilled than me — my poem had been chosen to be featured in an exclusive, hardcover anthology! And honored on a something-karat-gold plaque!

Of course, I had to pay $50 if I wanted to see my work in print in the anthology, and I had to pay another $100 if I wanted the plaque. Those were the only “prizes.”

Even as a pre-teen, I sensed a scam.

Sadly, not much has changed when it comes to companies trying to take advantage of writers who want a chance at recognition and maybe a little bit of money. Google the term “writing contests,” and you’ll come up with approximately 7.9 million results. It can be hard for a writer to know where to start looking for competitions, and how to tell if they’re legitimate or not.

So I’ve done the legwork for you.

 

Read the full post on The Write Life.

 

Do Awards Boost Anything Except Egos?

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This post by Tracy Weber originally appeared on InkSpot on 2/23/15.

My editor, the fabulous Terri Bischoff here at Midnight Ink, recently published a blog article in which she wondered out loud if winning an award—be it the Agatha, Lefty, or Edgar—meant anything to readers or to the future sales of an author.

It’s a valid question. We all bemoan poorly written manuscripts that manage to become New York Times bestsellers. I’ve yet to see a positive correlation between number of awards won and number of copies sold. So, other than hoping for an ego boost, why even bother?

The answer, for me, became clear last Sunday night when my first book, Murder Strikes a Pose, won the Maxwell Award for Fiction. Most of you have probably never heard of the Maxwell awards. In the mystery world, they are barely a blip on the radar. But in another writing community—people who write about dogs—the Maxwell Awards are important. They are the Academy Awards, if you will, of the dog writing community.

If you’ve read my work, you know that I’m dog crazy, and that a 100-pound German shepherd plays a prominent role in my series. Still, I’m a crime writer and my primary goal is to entertain readers.

But that’s not my only goal. My second goal is to save lives.

 

Read the full post on InkSpot.

 

My Book Is Not My Baby, Though Sometimes It Does Reek of Poo.

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her The Amazon Iowan blog on 1/15/15.

“My book is my baby.” You hear that a lot from authors, especially of novels, and as one of that number, I get it. Most of us don’t mean it more than a very loose metaphor, an image-intense description of what it’s like to create something out of almost nothing and have it become something much more. We imprint hopes and dreams on this creation, and we feel great affection for it. Ergo, baby.

While I won’t try to stop anyone else who insists on calling their books their babies, because it’s still a free country, etc, I am not one of those people. And because I just read something about books being babies that kind of made my eye twitch, I feel like clarifying why I am, in this particular instance, anti-baby.

When I write a story, there’s definitely a big stage where the thing is unformed, but it’s not an infant I’m teaching to walk or hold its head upright. I’m trying to find eyeballs and get rid of that weird third ear on top of its head. It’s clay, not flesh. Absolutely I talk to it and nurture it, but I also rip it apart, and kick it, and yell at it—if my books were my babies, they’d all be taken away by child protective services.

But even if I were to pretend that was all somehow okay baby-tending behavior, what I do next is even worse. I guess I could go with the editing and proofing and beta-reading as sending the kid to school, but…holy hell, I’m not letting it learn. I’m forcing it into a mold, making it acceptable to society in a way which, again, would probably get me arrested if I tried it with my actual flesh and blood child.

 

Read the full post on The Amazon Iowan.