How to Find and Work with Beta Readers to Improve Your Book

January 19, 2016 by Publetariat

Having a quality product is vitally important for successful indie authors. One way to improve the quality of your story is to get beta readers to read the manuscript and provide input. Getting a fresh pair of eyes to view your work can’t hurt. Kristen Kieffer (@ShesNovel) guesting on janefriedman.com offers eight tips on how to find and work with beta readers.

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How to Find and Work with Beta Readers to Improve Your Book

Note from Jane: Today’s guest post on beta readers from Kristen Kieffer (@ShesNovel) is an excerpt from her upcoming e-course on self-editing, Self-Editing Success.

No creative act is a solo endeavor.

Editors, designers, marketers—it takes a team of professionals to help authors bring their novels to life. But lurking behind the contracts and cut checks is a valuable set of hands many authors fail to exploit: beta readers.

Just as film directors benefit from the insight of test audiences, authors can learn much about the state of their novel’s appeal by working with readers willing to critique their story before it hits the market. With these readers often offering their time and feedback free of charge, what’s not to love?

Working with beta readers can provide authors with invaluable insight, helping them see their work through that pesky objective lens. With the feedback digested, authors can use what they’ve learned to better tailor their novel for marketable appeal, increasing their chances of releasing a commercial and critical success.

But not all beta reader experiences are created equal. As with any interaction involving an honest critique, working with beta readers can quickly grow into a regrettable experience if it isn’t designed for the benefit of both parties.

Let’s avoid any mess the first time around. If you’re ready to screen your novel with a test audience for honest and invaluable insight, here are eight steps to follow for an ideal beta-reader experience.

1. Identify Your Ideal Reader

There’s no use in sending your manuscript to an uninterested reader. By taking time to discover your novel’s ideal reader before sending out beta copies, you’ll be able to cultivate a list of betas who most accurately represent your future readers, saving you—and those unenthusiastic partners—a wealth of time and trouble.

How can you identify your ideal reader?

Think about the type of person most interested in your novel, then create a quick profile. Here are a few questions you might answer in your sketch:

What is their age and gender?
Do they read to be entertained or emotionally engaged?
What are their favorite books, television shows, and movies?
What makes them happy, sad, or angry?
What do they fear or regret?
Why do they enjoy reading?

If you’re struggling to form a strong image of your novel’s ideal reader, run a Google search of books related to your own. Begin reading through the reviews for each listing to identify the type of person who most enjoyed the work. Use what you learn to strengthen your answers to the questions above.

2. Cultivate Relationships with Beta Readers

If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to identify a group of potential beta readers to whom you’d like to pitch your manuscript. Though the easy route would be to email the first interesting person you find on the internet, I highly encourage you to take a step back.

The work of beta readers should not be taken lightly. To read a novel may be a simple task, but to analyze each element with a critical eye in search of weak areas, errors, and inconsistencies is anything but.

Before contacting strangers to ask for their help, take time to cultivate strong relationships. You can do this by first identifying the group of prospective beta readers you’d like to work with.

If you haven’t yet made any connections, begin by creating an account on the social media site where your ideal readers hang out. Young and new adult crowds are often found on Twitter or Instagram, while more mature readers usually congregate on Facebook.

Once you’ve chosen a platform, it’s time to establish your presence. Begin by adding a headshot for your profile picture and a succinct profile bio. Then, like or follow the feeds of other authors and notable creative figures. This will help potential beta readers gain a quick understanding of you and your interests as you begin to interact.

Speaking of interacting, your next step is to find and follow potential beta readers. Not everyone you eventually contact will accept your proposal, so I suggest following at least thirty potential betas. If you reach out to all and only a quarter accept, you’ll still have a fantastic group of beta readers to critique your novel.

To find potential beta readers, follow popular writing tags like #amwriting and #writercommunity. Make sure to use these tags when you publish your own posts. You can also find prospective betas in online writing groups, such as Writers Helping Writers or Fiction Writers.

Once you’ve found a few potential beta readers, begin interacting with them by liking and commenting on their posts and statuses. Offer friendly conversation, sharing in their daily joys and challenges. After a few weeks of genuine interaction, it’s time to move on to step three.

Read the full post on janefriedman.com

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below

Profit Engine: The Author Solutions Markup – from Writer Beware

January 19, 2016January 19, 2016 by Publetariat

Writer Beware is a site you should bookmark! Sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., the goal of the site is to shine a bright light on the scams and bad practices that prey on the unwary writer. Victoria Strauss looks a little deeper into the Author Solutions sale by Penguin and why smart writers might want to avoid them. Originally posted January 15, 2016.

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Profit Engine: The Author Solutions Markup

As most of you already know, Penguin Random House dumped Author Solutions at the end of 2015, selling it to a private equity firm for an undisclosed amount. (“A Penguin Random House Company” has already vanished from Author Solutions’ logo.)

The sale received quite a bit of media coverage, at least some of which acknowledged AS’s troubled reputation–something else that won’t be new to you if you’re a regular reader of this blog.

One of the areas that I and others have often criticized is AS’s huge range of marketing services, which are aggressively pitched to authors who sign up for publishing packages. Most of these services are dubiously useful (email blasts), jawdroppingly expensive (book signings at book fairs), or both (cinema advertising). Basically, they’re the equivalent of liquor at a restaurant: relatively inexpensive to deliver, but extremely profitable because of the enormous markup at which they can be sold. (AS executives have actually admitted, in depositions related to class action lawsuits brought against AS, that selling books is not one of the goals of AS’s marketing services.)

What’s the actual markup, though? How much difference is there between the price for which AS sells a service, and AS’s cost to deliver it?

Here’s an example. One of my readers drew my attention to this recent ad on Craigslist, in which Author Solutions seeks “freelance coverage writers” to “read self-published books and provide detailed, coherent coverage on the work’s potential for film/television/digital adaptation.”

Read the full post on Writer Beware

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Penguin Random House sells Author Solutions

January 14, 2016 by Publetariat

Labeled more a vanity press than real self publishing service provider, Author Solutions is controversial and faced a few lawsuits from unhappy authors. Enough so that Penguin Random House is distancing itself and basically ceding the self-publishing territory to Amazon. While I think Amazon provides some great services for indie authors, competition is healthy. I guess the problem is that Author Solutions wasn’t really competition as it was accused of making money off of authors, instead with authors. Please let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments, or even if you have some insight. I think we would all love to hear about anyone’s experiences with Author Solutions good or bad.

Benedicte Page and Katherine Cowdrey give us the details on the BookSeller site.

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PRH sells Author Solutions

Published January 5, 2016 by Benedicte Page and Katherine Cowdrey

Penguin Random House has sold its controversial self-publishing division Author Solutions.

Author Solutions, acquired by Pearson in 2012 for $116m (£74m), for integration into Penguin, was sold to an affiliate of Najafi Companies, an Arizona-based private investment firm, on 31st December. Financial terms were not disclosed.

In a note to staff, PRH c.e.o. Markus Dohle said: “We thank the entire Author Solutions team for their hard work and dedication during their time as part of Penguin Random House, and we wish them all the best and much success under the new ownership. With this sale, we reaffirm our focus on consumer book publishing through our 250 imprints worldwide, and our commitment to connecting our authors and their works to readers everywhere.”

The acquisition of Author Solutions by Pearson/Penguin was always controversial, with then Penguin c.e.o. John Makinson having to defend the company against accusations that the buy would muddy its brand image.

Makinson said at the time: “This acquisition will allow Penguin to participate fully in perhaps the fastest-growing area of the publishing economy and gain skills in customer acquisition and data analytics that will be vital to our future.”

Author Solutions continued to be run as a separate business, with Penguin staffer Andrew Phillips transferred to run it in place of former c.e.o. Kevin Weiss in 2013. Phillips confirmed that he would remain as chief executive of AS.

The self-publishing division was the subject of a lawsuit in the US, which was settled out of court last August, during which the business faced accusations from plaintiff authors of seeking to make money from authors, rather than for authors. Author Solutions lawyers maintained the suit was “a misguided attempt to make a federal class action out of a series of gripes”.

Read the full post on BookSeller

Bonus article off the Quartz site with more details – Amazon has officially won the multibillion-dollar self-publishing market

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THE E-PUBLISHING REVOLUTION IS DEFINITELY NOT OVER (Regardless of what you’ve heard)

January 13, 2016 by Publetariat

Today’s offering is in the spirit of why Publetariat was created. Agent Laurie McLean gazes into the future to let us know what to expect on Anne R Allen’s Blog. Too bad she couldn’t give us the US winning Powerball numbers – I would totally share with you. What do you think of her predictions? Let us know in the comments.

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THE E-PUBLISHING REVOLUTION IS DEFINITELY NOT OVER (Regardless of what you’ve heard)

We’re honored this week to host literary agent Laurie McLean of the Fuse Literary Agency. If you’re looking for an agent, we have great news for you! Although Laurie is not accepting unsolicited submissions, she will accept queries from readers of this blog! Scroll down for more info in Laurie’s bio. And now, here’s Laurie!… Anne

Agent Laurie McLean, Founding Partner of Fuse Literary, Looks into Her Crystal Ball

Thanks, Anne, for once again sharing your audience with me for my annual predictions of the year ahead in publishing. From the title of this post, you can tell I’m at odds with the notion that the digital publishing revolution is now over, ebooks are slipping in popularity, print is once again king of the world, indie bookstores are back on a steady footing, and adult coloring books are saving the world.

Well, except for that last one. I agree with traditional publishing that adult coloring books are propping up print book sales big time. But as far as the other “facts” go, I say hogwash.

That’s a lot to digest, so let me bullet point these 13 predictions for ease of digestion…and hopefully inspiration…for 2016!

1) Ebook sales are NOT stagnating.

I’ve always been a firm believer that you can make numbers and statistics dance to any beat you play and I believe the Big Five are skewing these numbers with their newly won agency pricing models.

Last year I saw several of my clients’ debut novels come out with an ebook price that was higher than the print book price. Check it out on Amazon. I’m not kidding. That’s part of the “decline” scenario, because honestly who would not buy a hardcover print book if it was cheaper than a digital book. Most people would make that choice.

And because of this, ebook sales from traditional publishers large and small seem to be declining.

Once you add Amazon ebook sales into the calculation, however, it all falls apart. Unfortunately that is not what most reports have done. They only concentrated on traditional retail sales numbers from their usual cast of publishers. So you’re getting fed false numbers. Ebooks are healthy and should continue to be healthy throughout 2016 and beyond. They are here to stay.

Once ebook pricing stabilizes, because while I’m sure the traditional booksellers and publishers are trying to help their physical retail partners (aka bookstores) by increasing print sales, they will see that they went too far and the smart ones will adjust. At least that is my opinion.

2) Physical bookstore sales will continue to decline.

Amazon already sells the vast majority of print and digital books. They are a healthy company. Heck, they signed up 3 million new Prime members at $99 a pop during the third week of December alone!

So I’m betting that they will continue to discount books, support indie authors through KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, and the local bookstores and chains will simply not be able to keep up.

I’ll talk about Google and Apple as possible white knights a bit later, but for now I’m predicting that Amazon is just going to keep growing and taking market share from bookstores in 2016.

Read the full post on Anne R Allen’s Blog

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American Idol for writers? Skrawl – a brand new world of collaborative storytelling…

January 12, 2016 by Publetariat

Occasionally I get contacted by over excited people who want to share something totally awesome and new with me that will make everyone a lot of money. Since I am trying to keep this site indie and clean I usually say no. But every once in a while, there is actually something cool that I think you will like.

Full disclosure – I am not making one penny off of this. This is a really awesome site that some of you might enjoy, and the people I have talked with seem super nice.

So now that is out of the way, let me introduce you to Skrawl.com.

Skrawl.com is a collaborative and competitive group writing website. Users have the choice to enter into a writing competition based on a theme or topic, then the readers view the entries and vote on their favorite. The winner’s entry becomes a part of the story and that process continues until the story is finished. Writing styles can range from stories, scripts, articles and debates while breaking off into numerous categories from Action & Adventure to Fan-Fiction. It is free to enter, which is always nice. They also have “writing challenges” where you can win prizes, on top of bragging rights.

It looks like a great way to get some practice in, meet other writers, and possibly get some exposure. Plus you get to vote on your favorites to move up. If anyone joins, could you come back and let us know how you like it and also give us a chance to root for you!

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7 Steps to Go From Slacker to Writing Machine

January 11, 2016 by Publetariat

This is about the time when my new years resolutions on writing start to get pushed aside. So in the spirit of trying to last a little longer I present you with this article from Lifehack. Author Antonio Tooley shares seven steps to help you become a lean mean writing machine! Care to share your writing goals for this year in the comments?

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We all love being lazy from time to time, and that’s perfectly alright, as long as it’s done in moderation. However, some of us are less disciplined than others, which means our “lazy” time spills over into our daily obligations. Writers, for instance, are extremely notorious for being lazy and prone to procrastination, which is perhaps best evident through their portrayal in the media. Fictional movie and TV characters such as Californication’s Hank Moody, or Secret Window’s Mort Rainey immediately spring to mind.

While this image is certainly exaggerated, a lot of writers could use some help when it comes to organizing their time and improving their creative output. Since writing is often seen as heavily dependent on bouts of inspiration and ideas, the writers’ approach to occasional dry spells or writer’s block would be to wait it out, and not do much in the meantime.

The good news is, not only can you make yourself more productive during those less-inspired periods, but you also can avoid them altogether, and it doesn’t require you to do anything revolutionary, other than making some tweaks to your usual approach and adopting some useful writing habits. No e-books, no magic pills, just 7 essential tips you can use to turn yourself into a writing machine you were supposed to be all along.

1. Write Down Your Ideas

As a writer, you are probably aware that great ideas are hard to come by. There are two ways you can deal with this. The first one would be to do some serious brainstorming, organize and collect your thoughts, and distill them down to ideas you can actually use. The second one would be to always write down those ideas which appear inside your mind at the most unexpected moments and situations.

Although it may seem like there is absolutely no way you’re going to forget about them, you probably will. You can fix this by writing them down using a piece of pen and paper, your smartphone, or specialized note-taking apps. Even though you may not use them right away, it’s great to have some of them in reserve.

Read the full post on Lifehack.com

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Fantasy World-building Questions By Patricia C. Wrede

January 7, 2016 by Publetariat

Patricia C. Wrede created this awesome list on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Of America website to help writers create a more realistic world for their characters. Who doesn’t want a world with depth and dimension in their story! I am bookmarking this, as it is a super helpful resource. Thanks Patricia!

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Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

By Patricia C. Wrede

The following list of questions is meant to aid authors of fantasy fiction who are seeking to create believable imaginary settings for their stories. While many of these questions may be helpful or crucial to certain stories, they will not all apply to every story. It is not necessary for an author to answer all, or even any, of the questions in order to start writing, (or to finish writing, either). The idea is simply to provoke people into thinking about the ways their settings and backgrounds hang together … or don’t. If it’s useful, use it. If not, don’t.

Some questions apply to more than one topic, and have been duplicated under more than one heading. This should not be considered as an exhaustive and final list, but as a beginning point from which each individual writer can compile a personal list.

The Questions

Read the full post on Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Of America

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How to Market Yourself as an Author Before You Have a Book to Sell

January 6, 2016 by Publetariat

On The Write Life, Chuck Sambuchino talks about the importance of making connections and setting a marketing plan in place before you even have a book published. I hate to use the term marketing here, because you want to make sincere connections and offer something of value to people, even if it is yourself. But Chuck does a good job of explaining that. Do you have any helpful tips on how to connect? If so please share in the comments, thanks!

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How to Market Yourself as an Author Before You Have a Book to Sell

September 2015 saw the release of three of Chuck’s new books, the 2016 Guide to Literary Agents, the 2016 Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market, and his anti-clown humor book When Clowns Attack: A Survival Guide.

Let’s say you have a book out and want to promote it. So you contact a website and offer to write a free guest post (or several) for them.

In exchange for providing the free content, you have some requests:

You want the column(s) to be accompanied by your book cover
You want the column(s) to be accompanied by your headshot
You want the column(s) to be accompanied by your bio, with a link in the bio that will redirect readers to a buy page for the book — Amazon or IndieBound or whatever you ask

Some people may have further things to promote, like classes or workshops or consultation services or an eBay profile full of knickknacks. It doesn’t matter.

The point is that if you’re writing the column for free, what you want out of the exchange is the chance to promote something. Simple and easy.

This is Guest Blogging 101, and everyone wins in this deal.

The best time to promote yourself: now

But what if you don’t have a book or anything to sell yet? What are you selling then? Simple: You’re selling a connection to yourself.

Sure, you don’t have a book for sale now, but you will in the future — so you need to connect yourself to interested individuals now so you can inform them of the book release down the road.

You can encourage potential readers to stay connected to you in a few simple ways:

Follow you on Twitter
Sign up for your free email newsletter
Like your Facebook fan page, or befriend you on your personal page
Subscribe to the RSS feed for your blog

Read the full post on The Write Life

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Comments are now open

January 5, 2016 by Publetariat

I have reopened comments on Publetariat. Hopefully, if all goes well, I will be eventually bring forums and communities back as soon as we get enough interest to make them worth while. The whole goal is to lovingly restore some of the community that April had built up here, and provide an indie space where writer can hang out.

Additionally, I have rescued a bunch of old comments and will try to restore them when time allows. Honestly I have no idea when that will be. If you are interested in your old comments, send me a message at paula@publetariat.com with your pertinent information and I will see if I can send you a file with them. Otherwise, please comment or let me know if you notice any problems.

Thanks!

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Anyone else taking the Goodreads 2016 challenge?

January 5, 2016 by Publetariat

Part of being a good writer is being a good reader. Goodreads is having a challenge, where you pledge how many books you are going to read. I did it last year but forgot to register my books. I am vowing to do better this year, but have kept my goal low since I really want to be able to put some time into Publetariat. If I can read a new book, once a month, and remember to log it, I will be quite happy. There are giveaways as well! Let us know how many books you are planning to read in the comments! We can cheer each other on!

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Want to Read More This Year? Join the 2016 Reading Challenge!

Forget about drinking more water or getting in shape! Our favorite New Year’s resolution is definitely this: Read More Books. And we’re guessing it’s yours, too. Make it easier by creating a reading goal and tracking your progress with the 2016 Reading Challenge on Goodreads!

Will it be one book every other month? Or maybe one book a week? A day? It’s up to you! Your goal can be any size. To get started, just choose the number of books you’d like to read this year.

Not sure what to read next? Don’t worry! Here are a few ways to build your want-to-read list on Goodreads:

– Recommendations: To get recommendations tailored just for you, rate books you’ve already read. The more books you rate, the better your recommendations will be!
– Giveaways: Did you know you can enter book giveaways for a chance to win free books?
– Lists: You can also browse the thousands of lists on Listopia—where you’ll find categories ranging from classic (Best Books of the 21st Century) to niche (Best Alpha Male Alien Meets Human Heroine Romance).
– Goodreads Choice Award winners: Peruse the results of the recently announced 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards, with winners and runners-up in 20 categories!

And it never hurts to have some social support when working toward a goal, so check out the many Goodreads groups that host reading challenges across every topic, theme, and genre imaginable.

Ten Easy Steps To Get your E-Book Ready For Editing

January 4, 2016 by Publetariat

Today we go to The Self Publishing Review where Cate Baum gives good advice on how to get your manuscript ready for editing and make your editor love you! I happen to disagree with #10, I do think there can be value added with a table of contents. Do you have any helpful hints or thoughts? If so, please share in the comments below.

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Ten Easy Steps To Get your E-Book Ready For Editing

As an independent author, there’s no getting away from the fact you will need to get your e-book edited professionally by the sort of editor who knows the differences between e-book and print book. However, these quick ten steps will help you prepare your book for the edit and final publication early on in the process. This is a ragbag of formatting and grammar tips, but trust me, your e-book editor will love you forever if you prep your book this way!

1. Strip out styles and fancy formatting

E-books don’t need styles manually applied in Word. The first thing any e-book editor worth their salt will do is strip them out. This is because on e-readers, the reader can choose which font family to read in, and any fancy scrolls or letters will be cancelled out and replaced by defaults. The best way to go is Times New Roman, and leave your choice of font for your print book. When you add headings later at the formatting stage, you’ll add these using your Styles and Formatting menu only.

2. Don’t use double spaces in sentences

The old-time habit of leaving two spaces at the end of a sentence is useless in the flowable text of an e-book. Flowable means that text is subject to change via the reader’s choice of font, font size, and spacing, so it’s not advisable to add typewriter-style formatting in a digital book. Double spacing is also moot in that since the advent of computers, spacing is configured to proportional adjustment.

The editor’s bible, the CMOS, states, ” p. 61. “2.12 A single character space, not two spaces, should be left after periods at the ends of sentences (both in manuscript and in final, published form).” p. 243. “6.11 In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks.” p. 243. “6.13 A period marks the end of a declarative or an imperative sentence. It is followed by a single space.”

Sorry double-space people. Them’s the rules.

Read the full post on The Self Publishing Review

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1.0 Is the Loneliest Number – (Why your rough draft is lonely)

January 3, 2016January 3, 2016 by Publetariat

This article from Matt Mullenweg, one of the founding developers of WordPress, is more software directed. But the concept is the same for writing. I am not talking about creating an eBook in a day with no editing, but rather to those people who always wished they could write and use “one more thing” as a means of procrastinating actually doing or completing any writing. This hits home for me, and one of the reasons why I took on this blog was to challenge myself away from this type of thinking. Perhaps if we hold hands and take a breath we can both jump forward together?

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1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

Many entrepreneurs idolize Steve Jobs. He’s such a perfectionist, they say. Nothing leaves the doors of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino without a polish and finish that makes geeks everywhere drool. No compromise!

I like Apple for the opposite reason: they’re not afraid of getting a rudimentary 1.0 out into the world.

“No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” — cmdrtaco, Slashdot.org, 2001, reviewing the first iPod

I remember my first 1G iPhone. Like a meal you have to wait for, or a line outside a club, the fact that I stood in line for hours made the first time I swiped to unlock the phone that much sweeter. It felt like I was on Star Trek and this was my magical tricorder… a tricorder that constantly dropped calls on AT&T’s network, had a headphone adapter that didn’t fit any of the hundreds of dollars of headphones I owned, ran no applications, had no copy and paste, and was as slow as molasses.

Now, the crazy thing about that release is when the original iPhone went public, flaws and all, you know that in a secret room somewhere on Apple’s campus they had a working prototype of the 3GS with a faster processor, better battery life, normal headphone jack… a perfect everything. Steve Jobs was probably already carrying around one in his pocket. How painful it must have been to have everyone criticizing them for all the flaws they had already fixed but couldn’t release yet because they were waiting for component prices to come down or for some bugs to be worked out of the app store.

“$400 for an Mp3 Player! I’d call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time… and it’s not really functional. Uuhh Steve, can I have a PDA now?” — elitemacor, macrumors.com, 2001, responding to the original iPod announcement

Or, I wonder, are they really quite zen about the whole thing? There is a dark time in WordPress development history, a lost year. Version 2.0 was released on December 31st, 2005, and version 2.1 came out on January 22nd, 2007. Now just from the dates, you might imagine that perhaps we had some sort of rift in the open source community, that all the volunteers left or that perhaps WordPress just slowed down. In fact it was just the opposite, 2006 was a breakthrough year for WP in many ways: WP was downloaded 1.5 million times that year, and we were starting to get some high-profile blogs switching over. The growing prominence had attracted scores of new developers to the project and we were committing new functionality and fixes faster than we ever had before.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.

“hey – heres an idea Apple – rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?” — Pants, macrumors.com, 2001

I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed. But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

A beautiful thing about Apple is how quickly they obsolete their own products. I imagine this also makes the discipline of getting things out there easier. Like I mentioned before, the longer it’s been since the last release the more pressure there is, but if you know that if your bit of code doesn’t make this version but there’s the +0.1 coming out in 6 weeks, then it’s not that bad. It’s like flights from San Francisco to LA, if you miss one you know there’s another one an hour later so it’s not a big deal. Amazon has done a fantastic job of this with the Kindle as well, with a new model every year.

Read the full post on Matt Mullenweg and maybe show a rough draft to someone?

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

Happy Holidays & A Wonderful New Year – What is Figgy Pudding?

January 3, 2016December 24, 2015 by Publetariat

Publetariat will be off until Jan 3, 2016. Hoping you have a wonderful holiday season and we will see you again next year! Until then here is a podcast and post on Figgy Pudding from NPR.

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‘Oh, Bring Us Some … ‘ Wait. What Is Figgy Pudding?

This holiday season, one popular Christmas carol has been raising some questions here at NPR headquarters. Namely:

“Oh, bring us some figgy pudding, oh, bring us some figgy pudding, oh — ”

Wait. What is figgy pudding?

First of all, it’s “absolutely delicious,” says Debbie Waugh, who recently served the dish at a tea at the Historic Green Spring House in Alexandria, Va.

Figgy pudding — also known as plum pudding or Christmas pudding — is a staple of the British Christmas table, she says.

“It resembles something like a cannonball, and it maybe feels a bit like a cannonball when it hits your stomach, but it’s tradition and we love it,” Waugh tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

And despite its moniker, the dessert features neither figs nor plums.

From The Archives

From 2007: A Recipe For Figgy Pudding (With Actual Figs)

“The ‘plum’ was a pre-Victorian generic term for any type of dried fruit, but most specifically, raisins,” Waugh explains. ” ‘Figgy’ — certainly at some time figs would have been incorporated into Christmas pudding recipes, but today, not traditionally.”

It’s also a pudding in the British sense, meaning dessert — not the creamy, custardy dish most Americans associate with the word. It’s a steamed cake full of raisins, currants and brandy.

Read the full post on NPR

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

The big question: are books getting longer? – Does size matter?

January 3, 2016December 23, 2015 by Publetariat

Richard Lea over at theguardian finds out that size really does matter, at least in the literary world. Some of this is due to the rise of the eBook. When you can carry your whole library with you, a 900 page tome is no problem.

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The big question: are books getting longer?

A new survey of bestsellers and critics’ picks has concluded that the average book is now 25% bigger than 15 years ago. But not everyone reads things this way

Books are steadily increasing in size, according to a survey that has found the average number of pages has grown by 25% over the last 15 years.

A study of more than 2,500 books appearing on New York Times bestseller and notable books lists and Google’s annual survey of the most discussed books reveals that the average length has increased from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014.

According to James Finlayson from Vervesearch, who carried out the survey for the interactive publisher Flipsnack, there’s a “relatively consistent pattern of growth year on year” that has added approximately 80 pages to the average size of the books surveyed since 1999.

For Finlayson, much of this shift can be explained by the industry’s shift towards digital. “When you pick up a large book in a shop,” he says, “you can sometimes be intimidated, whereas on Amazon the size of a book is just a footnote that you don’t really pay all that much attention to.” The rise of digital reading is also a factor, he adds. “I always hold off buying really big books until I’m going on holiday, because I don’t want to lug them around in my bag. But if you have a big book on a Kindle, that’s not a consideration.”

The literary agent Clare Alexander agrees that long books are more portable in electronic formats, but points out that much ebook reading is focused on genres such as romance, crime and erotica. For Alexander, the gradual increase in size is evidence of a cultural shift.

“Despite all the talk of the death of the book because of competition from other media,” she says, “people who love to read appear to prefer a long and immersive narrative, the very opposite of a sound bite or snippets of information that we all spend our lives downloading from Google.

“The Americans have led the way – think Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, Hanya Yanagihara and most recently Marlon James (Jamaican but living in America) – but they are not alone. Hilary Mantel from the UK or Eleanor Catton from New Zealand have both written long novels, and if you look through that list you will see how many of these have won prizes. So clearly the literary establishment loves long books too.”

The Man Booker prize has been a pillar of the literary establishment in the UK since the 1970s, and evidence of expansion can be found in the roster of winners. The first five years of Booker-winning novels average out at around 300 pages, but even taking into account Julian Barnes’s 2011 triumph with his 160-page novella The Sense of an Ending, the last five years of Booker laureates weigh in at an average of 520 pages. This year’s winner was brief only in name: Marlon James’s 700-page A Brief History of Seven Killings.

For Max Porter, the editor at Granta who published the 800-page Booker winner of 2013, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, it’s difficult to get a sense of a shift across the whole market but it’s “heartening to see these big, ambitious books appearing”.

“All across culture, people are trying to work out whether content is going to become mobile, what devices people are going to be using to consume it,” says Porter, “so I’m quite encouraged by the big, fat book sitting there saying: ‘read me’.”

The rise of the television box set, where viewers will commit to spending dozens of hours following a single narrative, has encouraged publishers to support writers exploring a bigger canvas, Porter continues. “It’s shown that people have the appetite, patience and stamina to stick with a plot and characters as they develop over a large span.”

Read the full series on theguardian.com.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

Are small independent publishers doing the work for big publishers?

January 3, 2016December 22, 2015 by Publetariat

Today’s post by Kevin Duffy, the co-founder of independent publisher Bluemoose Books, off of theguardian.com site dated December 22, 2015 .

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Are small independent publishers doing the work for big publishers?

While the giant firms sink huge sums into fleeting fads, the commitment and passion of the smaller imprints leave a larger impression in the long term

Here’s an observation: it sometimes feels as though smaller independents are the research and development departments for the big publishers, where literary fiction is concerned. We find great writers, nurture them, wipe their brows, polish their work and buff it until it shines. Then we send them out, readers love the books and they get shortlisted and win major literary prizes.

Then the big money imprints swoop in; whisking them away to put them in a sparkly marketing jacket and present them in their new package to the world. A few recent examples: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, originally published by Galley Beggar – subsequently taken up by Faber and Faber. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, published by And Other Stories – and now by Penguin.

Why are independent publishers managing to get more of their authors’ work on to prize shortlists and win more awards than the bigger firms? Two of the last three Man Booker winners were published by independents. How could that be?

Well, we read unsolicited manuscripts. We read more stories. Big publishers only use agents, who have their own economic imperative, and they miss out on a host of brilliant books every day, every month, every year. Like John Murray, part of Hachette, which called Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney “the modern classic that we all missed” when it was shortlisted for the Costa first novel prize this year. They plucked it from Yorkshire publisher Tartarus, secured it a film deal, and it became one of the best-reviewed debuts this year.

Big publishing has tried to monetise creativity, kneeling at the altar of the pie chart and Venn diagram. And for new literary fiction it isn’t working.

I have been told on numerous occasions by agents and editors: “But Kevin, you’re not a London publisher,” as if geography has anything to do with finding cracking stories. This chiding does give you an insight into another problem for big publishing: the issue of “unpaid internships”, class, and a narrowing of the social backgrounds of people entering publishing, their limited life experiences, reading tastes and how this influences their acquisitions. They are missing out on millions and millions of readers because of a business model that isn’t really working.

Read the full series on theguardian.com.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

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How to Find and Work with Beta Readers to Improve Your Book

1. Identify Your Ideal Reader

2. Cultivate Relationships with Beta Readers

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Profit Engine: The Author Solutions Markup

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PRH sells Author Solutions

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THE E-PUBLISHING REVOLUTION IS DEFINITELY NOT OVER (Regardless of what you’ve heard)

Agent Laurie McLean, Founding Partner of Fuse Literary, Looks into Her Crystal Ball

1) Ebook sales are NOT stagnating.

2) Physical bookstore sales will continue to decline.

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1. Write Down Your Ideas

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By Patricia C. Wrede

The Questions

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How to Market Yourself as an Author Before You Have a Book to Sell

The best time to promote yourself: now

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Ten Easy Steps To Get your E-Book Ready For Editing

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1.0 Is the Loneliest Number

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‘Oh, Bring Us Some … ‘ Wait. What Is Figgy Pudding?

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The big question: are books getting longer?

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Are small independent publishers doing the work for big publishers?

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