Publetariat

Hey all,

My name is Doyce Testerman and I live near Denver, Colorado.

 

At this point I have not been part of any self-published fiction, though I have work as an editor on a number of gaming-related books that have been released through Lulu and a few other PoD sites.  I currently have an agent representing one of my novels (a mystical realism story called Hidden Things) to traditional publishers, though I’ve grown weary of feedback that says "we love it, it’s so tight and focused and fun; we’d like to talk about a sequel or series… but can you add first 25 pages — we don’t know… somewhere?"  Grr.

 

I’ve also had several short stories published in anthologies with traditional publishers and online fiction mags.

 

I’ve been involved with the indie press revolution in the roleplaying game industry (where, like rock and roll and art, ‘indie’ is actually a positive thing) and I’m starting to see that kind of movement in fiction publishing, which excites me.
 

I just need to jump in the water and figure out this ‘swimming’ thing.

BLUE LINE PUBLISHING HOUSE, INC. has done it!

THE EXECUTION OF JUSTICE by MICHAEL PHELPS is now available in Hardcover – First Edition for just $27.95!

It can be bought at:

www.MichaelPhelpsNovels.com

www.amazon.com

www.barnesandnoble.com

www.Target.com

And soon at other fine outlets.

 

 

This piece, by Novella Carpenter, was originally published on sfgate.com, the online arm of The San Francisco Chronicle, on 2/24/09.

In this bad economy, it’s tougher than ever to sell books

I had always thought that books were recession-proof…

…that most people facing a night at home due to budgetary constraints would gladly curl up with a mug of hot water, put on extra socks to keep the nip of their unheated apartment at bay, and read. While the rest of the world frittered away money on outings to movie theaters and bars, surely the frugal-minded (whose numbers are increasing) would choose to spend pennies on the hour soaking up the pages of a good novel?

 

That’s what I thought, but if you believe panicked grumblings about the book publishing industry, I must be totally wrong: Holiday book sales were abysmal, and most of the major publishing houses have announced job losses in recent months.

One publishing behemoth, HarperCollins, lost 75 percent of its operating income during the first six months of 2008. Over all, the publishing industry has struggled as bookstore sales — and the economy — have slowed drastically.

I feel terrible for those who have lost their jobs in publishing, and I fear for bookstores. But to be honest, the reason I’ve been watching the slow demise of book publishing with an ever-increasing sense of dread has to do with my own personal circumstances. You see, almost two years ago, in the flush of a strong economy, I booked a flight for New York and sold my first book to a major publisher. I remember looking at the publication date: June 2009, and thinking it was impossibly far away. Now, with June just around the corner and galleys of my book out to reviewers and book buyers, IÕm sure my book (my baby!) will suffer horribly.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been investigating the damaged state of publishing, seeking out advice from a wide spectrum of editors, authors and bookstore owners to gauge whether my fears of failure are substantiated. Their advice does not bode well.

"There’s a lurking fear here," said Kate, an editor at a mid-sized publishing house in New York who asked to remain anonymous. "Big accounts aren’t taking as many books. What we’re seeing is people don’t impulse buy books anymore. There’s less pleasure buying now."

Slower book sales mean less money for publishing houses, who then may be forced to downsize the company, laying off editors who acquire books and other positions that aren’t deemed crucial for day to day functionality. Kate, who has worked in book publishing for eight years now, has friends who work for Random House, one of the hardest hit houses. "They have been holding their breath," Kate said, "worrying about whether the axe will come down on them."

Kate went into publishing because she loves books, sharing ideas and working with eccentrically intelligent editors. The pay — she started at $28,000 — is notoriously lousy, especially after factoring in the high cost of living in New York City. But the economic crisis has made her "very glad to be employed," she said.

And yet, her anxiety is unmistakable: She knows that if her books don’t sell, her job security may be compromised. She is confident other cost-savings will be implemented before job cuts take place. Instead of hours-long lunch meetings at high-end restaurants, for example, editors, authors and agents now settle for coffee or in-office meetings. As for the future, Kate’s publishing company isn’t going to be acquiring any frivolous titles.

"None of us know when the market will recover," she said. "But right now, I’m very worried about my books — books that I believe in. They are going to be selling into a terrible climate."

I shyly mentioned my own (probably doomed) book, and asked her for advice.

"The best advice for today, and really in any financial climate, is to be fanatical and motivated to promote your book," she said. "Do as many events as possible. Become a shameless self-promoter."

Read the rest of the article at sfgate.com.

 

“You just can’t get there from here.”

How many times have you heard that direction-giving joke? But often that line describes a type of writer’s block. You’ve written up to a certain point. You know where you want to go up ahead. But what do you write in between? Personally, I have wasted hours, days, even weeks, trying to figure out what to write next, so I can get to that future scene I already have in my head.

But wait. Who says you have to write in a linear fashion? What if you write out of sequence? Aha! Now, you’ve given yourself permission to write the scene from your head and it flows wonderfully. Another Aha! Questions and solutions actually appear about how the character might have arrived here from there. You’re not stuck any more.

As a writing instructor once explained, to build a bridge, one first needs to erect a scaffold. It’s not a lot different in writing. You have several important scaffold scenes in your story or novel that have to take place (there will probably be more than one of each of these scenes in your book):

1. The Introductory Scene where the reader meets your main character.  
    
2. A Meeting Scene, where the main character meets another character (maybe the love interest or maybe his nemesis) This is another form of Introductory Scene.  
    
3. A Conflict Scene where two characters battle it out, whether physically, verbally, or in a match of wits. Or where the character battles himself.  
    
4. A Realization Scene—the moment the character realizes something about herself that is a turning point. Or realizes her “enemy” is really her friend.  
    
5. A Resolution Scene, where a problem is resolved (not necessarily the main one, but a problem nonetheless).  
    
6. A Final Scene, which may or may not be your actual ending. An interesting exercise is to write a scene in which your main character(s) are old and looking back at what happened, what he/she/they learned, how they’ve changed, what they would’ve done differently, etc. That can give you an insight to “fill in the blanks.”  
    

Another interesting exercise is to write a letter from your main character to yourself, as if this person has just learned you are writing a book about her, how she feels about that, any advice she might have for you, etc. This can be quite revealing. Sometimes you learn that you have a reluctant character, one who doesn’t want her story told. So you have to figure out how to win her over.

A recent article in The Writer magazine talked about writing out of order. The author made similar suggestions to the ones above, such as:

1. Write a scene in which the main character enters a new place.
    
2. Take a minor character you’ve introduced and write a scene where he/she appears later in the story.
    
3. Choose a character other than the main character—someone you’d like to know more about, and write a monologue in which she explores or explains herself.
    
4. Write a scene where your main character has a dream that advances the story.
    
5. Make a list of at least five crucial scenes that you think will be important for the story/novel (see “scaffold scenes above.)
    

Any one or all of these scenes may or may not appear in your final draft, but they will help you keep writing and develop ideas.

Have fun, write on and defeat that Writer’s Block! (Now, I just have to take my own advice.) 

This article, by Garth Risk Hallberg, was originally posted at Slate on January 22, 2008, but is no less revelent to the world of Amazon reviews today.

Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating … addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp’s style. Sure, he’d spelled my name wrong, but hadn’t he also judged me "a sensitive observer of human foibles"? Only when I noticed the "Top 10 Reviewer" tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer.

After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she’d solicited Grady Harp’s review.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits," as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

On the surface, Grady Harp seems just the sort of enlightened consumer who might lead us out of Web 1.0’s darkness. A 66-year-old gallerist, retired surgeon, and poet, he has reviewed over 3,500 books, CDs, and movies for Amazon. In turn, he has attained a kind of celebrity: a No. 7 ranking; a prominent profile on the Web site; and, apparently, a following. In the week after his endorsement of my work appeared, more than 100 readers clicked on a button that said, "I found this review helpful." His stated mission is to remain "ever on the lookout for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow." At present, Dr. Harp’s vigil runs to about 500,000 words—a critical corpus to rival Dr. Johnson’s—and his reviews are clearly the product of a single, effusive sensibility. Jose Saramago’s Blindness is "A Searing, Mesmerizing Journey" (five stars); The Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop’s Dirty Little Drawings, "A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove" (five stars).

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users’ motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely.

A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer’s standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the web site.

Read the rest of the article on Slate, here.

This article, by Mick Rooney, was originally posted on his POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing blog on 10/10/08.

 

Over the past month, there has been considerable debate about the current state and future of the publishing industry across the internet on writer’s forums and blogsites. Some of the discussion was sparked by Boris Kachka’s recent article in the New York Magazine.

A lot of the criticism of Kachka’s article seems to centre on his depressing analysis expressed from speaking with industry insiders about the current predicament in publishing across the globe. One of the key quotes he uses in his article is from statistician, Philip Roth;

“…there were at most 120,000 serious readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade.”

Many avid readers will naturally disagree with the Roth quote, and, in fact, I also disagree, but with this caveat. There are perhaps more people reading now, than at any point in the history of mankind. It is time that the publishing industry started to more accurately look at ‘what’ is being read, and more to the point, ‘where’ and ‘how’ it is being read.

Let me digress for just a while before returning to Mr. Roth’s quote.

I think before we can access what state the publishing industry is in right now, we must first look at where it has been and the reasons why it has reached such a pivotal and directionless state. It is not surprising that the industry, like many, has pedalled along and mirrored the rises and falls in the standard of living and economic recessions.

Let us not forget that some of us still living can remember when competent literacy was not always the accepted given that it is now. Let us also not forget that the vast amount of information we take in on a day to day basis is through the written word. Whether that is reading the morning newspaper; the billboards and road signs on the way to work in the car or train; opening our work emails; reading countless memos, reports; studying the lunchtime menu in the cafeteria; browsing the evening newspapers; the recipe for our dinner in the evening; our favourite websites and blogsites; not to mention the countless text messages we receive every day on our mobiles; right to the very point when we fall into bed with the latest bedtime read; they all confront us as part of everyday life.

The fact is, day in, day out, we are reading to overload point. Much of it may be seen as a chore, and some of it may be seen as pleasure. True, pleasurable reading, whether it is Barbara Cartland or James Joyce, Raol Dahl or Stephen Hawkins, will always have the common denominator of shared experience and the identification of a writer to his true reader, and the reader to their favourite writer.

You cannot accurately define the relationship of author/reader in any theoretical form or publishing model. This is even beyond the best publisher’s entrepreneur or even the greatest and most entertaining of writers, because it is fluid, ethereal, and constantly affected by public trends and the personal moods of mankind.

This is not to say that the publishing industry cannot set itself up in a way that gives it the best chance of flourishing, rather than floundering aimlessly amid its printed words and marketing blurbs.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the industry inherently began to seriously change in the economic recession of the 1980’s. The book publishing world followed the mark of the newspaper empires of Murdock and Maxwell, where a handful of media companies controlled the entire national world newsprint output. Throughout the 1980’s, large commercial publishers consumed smaller commercial and independent publishers. We watched large publishers dance around like politicians, desperate to tell us all how different they were from each other, yet, all the while, the centre stage became evermore crowded and the publishing model they used became steadily narrower.

The following are the reasons why I believe the publishing industry has reached its current state of being.
 

Read the rest of the article at Mick Rooney’s POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing blog.

Hello from the still mostly frozen north!

 

I’ve long been a firm believer in the successful future of indie publishing, and as a writer on the verge of taking the leap, this certainly seems to be the place for me.

 

Now, off to read and learn.

Vive le self-publishing!

 

   After finishing a project to the point of publishing a new book, I find myself sitting at the keys of my computer staring at a blank screen.  My adrenalin in high and I have a hard time sitting still.  It is my time to write and write I will even if it kills me.

   Story after story pushes to the fore front of my thoughts and begs for release. There are so many words that want out of my head it is hard to choose which ones to type.  Some times I think it would be easier if I had writers block.

   To calm my self, I pull up the published manuscript and find the minor mistakes that slipped through the editing cracks.  "OMG," I think, "how can I let anyone see this."  I want to hide in a closet with embarassment.

   Then I push myself up to the computer and let the emotional turmoil roll out of my fingures.  Somehow it turns into words.  Sometimes it is good and sometimes not, but I have taken my turn at the keys and met my goal of typing for the day.

   Day after day I will do this until one day I find the story to focus on.  Soon the production begins and I find myself anticipating the publication of another book.

   I promise myself, "soon I will find that groove." Until then, "It’s just another day at the keys."

Sondi

 

If you read Corey Dietz‘ piece, Podcasting For DumbDumbs, but felt you might like a little more control over the process of creating your podcasts than that provided by the services in the article, yet don’t have the resources to pour into a state-of-the-art home recording studio, take a look at Audacity. 

From the Audacity site:  

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

The software is entirely free and very well-documented, with an FAQ, Users Manual (also available as a PDF or HTML download) and Tutorials.  

So if you’ve been thinking about dipping your toe into the podcasting pool to create audiobooks, audio blog entries or the like, you might want to give Audacity a try.  And if you do, be sure to report back in the Digital Publishing User Reviews forum, to share your experience with your fellow Publetarians.   

There’s been a somewhat heated discussion going on at Romance Writers of America (aka RWA) over the last few months—which is nothing new and not all that surprising. After all, if you’re going to involve yourself with a large group of mostly female, inordinately verbal, excessively imaginative, and expressly passionate people, you ought to expect debate. And lots of it. 

This particular discussion revolves around the question of what makes someone a career writer as opposed to a hobbyist, and some of what’s been said by various members of the BoD has a lot of people feeling angry and trivialized.

At first glance, it might seem to be a fairly easy question to answer, but since RWA policy has always been weighted heavily in favor of large, traditional print publishers, nothing is as easy or simple as it seems.

To read more of my opinion on the subject follow this link: http://rhymeswithforeplay.blogspot.com/2009/02/tale-of-three-little-authors.html

 

I’m Ashleen O’Gaea (say that oh-gee-uh, as in "Oh, gee, uh … I don’t know how to say that!") and I’ve joined Publetariat because I’m on the verge of self-publishing, sort of.

I’ve published a few non-fiction books about Wicca, through traditional houses, but breaking into fiction is hard, and I’m impatient.  I’ve got a few novels I’d like to see out there, and the one I’m experimenting with first is called The Green Boy.  It’s about a Wiccan priestess who "chances" to meet a young man who’s grown up believing that her mother killed his mother by hexcraft.

Besides being a writer, I volunteer as a (writing) prison minister; I’m a dog-and-cat mommy, a camper, an amateur photographer … and I wish I could draw.

Merry hi!  My name’s Ashleen O’Gaea, and I’m new here!  And I’m on the verge of self-publishing a novel.

Before I go any farther: my first name’s easy to pronounce.  I’ll answer to Ashleen or Ashleen.  My last name is pronounce oh-gee-uh — as in oh, gee, uh … I don’t know how to pronounce that.

My about-to-be novel is called The Green Boy, and it’s the first in a series of novels about a Wiccan priestess, her family, and her coven.  I have published a few books traditionally, non-fiction books about the religion of Wicca.  You can check them out — and I hope you will — through my website, www.AshleenOGaea.com, or my other website, www.AdventureWicca.com

I also write a family column and various reviews for the Pagan ‘zine PanGaia.  And I am a dog-mommy and a cat-mommy, and a camper, and an amateur photographer . . . and I wish I could draw.