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This essay, by Edan Lepucki, originally appeared on The Millions on 8/23/11.

In May, after my novel manuscript had been read and rejected by a healthy number of editors, my husband rewrote my author bio. It read as follows:

Edan Lepucki was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1981. He currently lives in East Bushwick.

As an American woman living in an uncool neighborhood in Los Angeles, I thought this hilarious. I also wondered — not entirely seriously, and not entirely in jest — if the revision might help my situation. My situation being that my agent had begun submitting my book nine months prior (not that I was keeping track), and it remained unsold. Admittedly, there had been close calls with two different editors, but, as everyone knows, almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. I was in the same place I’d been back in September. That is, unpublished. The waiting game was starting to char my soul; if you drew a finger across it and put that finger to your tongue, it would taste bitter. Joking with my husband (“Now that I’m nursing, I’ll send them a new author photo, cleavage and all!”) was one of the few coping mechanisms I had left in me.

Now that it’s almost September (“If anyone in publishing actually worked in the summer, I would’ve sold my book by now!”), the jokes aren’t as funny. The truth is, my novel isn’t selling, and it probably won’t. There, I’ve said it. Eventually, a writer must accept rejection, accept the death of her first true darling, and move on. Can I face that sobering reality? Can I put my first book into the drawer, and shut it?

Others have done it before me. There’s a long and rich history of successful writers whose first (second, third…) books didn’t see the light of day. I remember when Myla Goldberg came to speak to the Creative Writing Department at Oberlin. She explained that Bee Season was actually her second novel. “My first,” she told us wide-eyed undergraduates, “you’ll never read.” At twenty, I thought this terribly tragic. In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Dan Kois wrote about novelists who abandoned books for one reason or another: Michael Chabon’s infamously unfinished tome, Fountain City, for instance, and the burned pages of Gogol and Waugh. But the differences between these authors and myself are important. Firstly, they all had dazzling careers, failed book or not. I can’t (yet…) say the same for myself. Secondly, these authors decided to kill their books, whereas my darling was murdered.

Read the rest of the essay on The Millions.

Publetariat staff are taking Friday, 9/2 through Monday, 9/5 off in observance of the U.S. Labor Day holiday. No new content will be posted to the site until the evening of Monday the 5th, though Publetariat members can still post to the Publetariat Forum and their own Publetariat blogs in the interim.

And by the way, did you know Labor Day was made a U.S. national holiday in order to quell social unrest following the deaths of some striking workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals in 1894—essentially out of government fear of retaliation from the labor movement? Yeah, neither did we till we looked it up on Wikipedia.

This article, by Sarah Crown, originally appeared on the Guardian UK’s Books Blog on 9/1/11.

A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?

How’s about this for some brave new world-ery? Very interesting piece in The Atlantic about a company called Booktrack, which "creat[es] synchronized soundtracks for e-books that dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement".

The company was founded by brothers Mark and Paul Cameron, after Mark realised that "as he selected his own music-reading pairings" he was "choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page". Inspired, the pair set about devising "movie-like soundtracks for digital books" (it only works for digital books, as the soundtrack needs to be linked to the page you’re reading), combining sound effects and original music. They only have tracks for a handful of books so far, but if you click on the copy of Sherlock Holmes on the top shelf on this page, and watch the trailer, you get a sense of where they’re going with it.

It’s an interesting idea, and I’d quite like to try it out. If done well, I guess it could potentially enhance the reading experience, though I worry – even from watching that brief Sherlock Holmes snippet – that the words and the sound effects would fall out of sync too easily. My only real concern is that I’d be sorry to see the demise of the accidental soundtracks that have punctuated my own reading life.
 

Read the rest of the article, and view a video about Booktrack, on the Guardian UK’s Books Blog.

This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 8/30/11.

I’ve had a few people forward me the article written by Ewan Morrison for the Guardian, Are Books Dead, And Can Authors Survive?

Read the rest of the post on J.A. Konrath‘s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

There are times in every writer’s life when ideas will come flooding in — but not for the story you’re working on.  You don’t want to forget those little gems because they would be great in another story, yet they’re useless for what you’re doing right now.  So what do you do?

Something I learned a long time ago was to keep an idea file.  Ideas come in many forms from quotes we’ve read to pictures we’ve seen to that fabulous new movie we just saw (if you have the time ).  Whatever the form, it’s best to capture the idea as soon as possible.

For certain items, such as magazine articles, it’s easy enough to rip them out and file them away.  For others we have to get a bit more creative.  An example would be a wonderful painting from a museum.  It’s considered a crime to grab the painting and run (and I’m pretty sure trying to explain it away as “needing it for my idea file” wouldn’t get you very far).  Thus we must get creative.  You may be able to photograph it or, barring that, perhaps sketch it.  If you’re art skills don’t go beyond stick men, then maybe you could write a description of it.

One nifty little tool I’ve discovered is Evernote. If you’ve got a smart phone, this application can be very useful. Snap a picture of whatever sparked your story idea, then share it to your Evernote with notes, tags, whatever. Your ideas are readily available to you via the web on any smartphone (with the downloaded app) or computer.

Regardless of how you get the inspirational item into your idea file, remember to write down the idea that was inspired and attach it.  Sticky notes work great for hard copies (though the sticky does eventually wear off so be aware that your ideas may go wandering in your file).

Writing takes ideas.  Being an Independent Author means being creative in every area of your career.  And so, that’s why it’s important to collect the little gems that inspire you along.

What other creative solutions have you found to capturing story ideas?

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.

This post originally appeared on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

Learning disabilities, including dyslexia, ADD, ADHD, and autism can be life changing and debilitating. Many students struggle in school or drop out altogether. But for others, a learning disability may be a gift, requiring them to work harder and achieve more, or have a special focus or talent. It is for this reason that so many high achieving people have learning disabilities, including Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo Da Vinci. Although those with learning disabilities typically have trouble with communication, many writers are also in the high achieving, learning disabled club. We’ve highlighted 25 of them here: famous authors and writers who suffer, or thrive from, a learning disability.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time, with about four billion copies sold and translations into at least 103 languages. She is best known for her detective novels and short story collections. But at the same time, she couldn’t even balance her own checkbook due to her learning disability, believed to be dysgraphia. She had a hard time spelling correctly, as a self proclaimed "extraordinarily bad speller" and was not good about remembering numbers, but her learning disability did not hold her back.
 

Stephen J. Cannell

Stephen J. Cannell was an American writer and novelist, as well as TV producer and sometime actor. His most celebrated work was crime drama scripts, with writing credits including The A-Team, 21 Jump Street, The Rockford Files, and The Greatest American Hero. He suffered from dyslexia and struggled in school, but he graduated from the University of Oregon. Cannell used his fame to speak out about dyslexia, and discussed his experiences in the documentary Dislecksia: The Movie.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known for his novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as many short stories. But F. Scott Fitzgerald is believed to have had a learning disability, mostly likely dyslexia. It’s reported that he was kicked out of school at the age of 12 for not focusing or finishing his work, and he had a very hard time spelling, but he succeeded as a writer despite his disability.

Scott Adams

The man behind the comic strip Dilbert self-diagnosed his dyslexia. He was working as a bank teller and noticed that his totals didn’t balance at the end of the day. But dyslexia does not seem to have hindered his success, as Dilbert is well loved, in addition to his books, restaurant ownership, and appearances on TV shows. Adams also suffers from focal dystonia, a condition that causes involuntary muscular contraction, as well as spasmodic dysphonia, but he is able to work around all of his conditions.
 

JF Lawton

JF Lawton is a prolific screenwriter, with screen credits including Pretty Woman, Under Siege, and DOA: Dead or Alive. But before he became a popular screenwriter, he suffered from severe dyslexia. The disability made school life difficult, and Lawton had to work hard to overcome this obstacle to become a writer. He credits his father, author Harry Lawton, with the support he needed to succeed– something that families of dyslexics should keep in mind.
 

Dav Pilkey

Dav Pilkey, author and illustrator of the Captain Underpants book series, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at an early age. His disabilities caused him to act out in class, and he spent lots of time banished to a desk in the school hallway. It was at this desk where he created Captain Underpants, the character that made him famous as an author and illustrator of children’s literature. For Dav Pilkey, dyslexia and ADHD helped launch a career.

George Bernard Shaw

The famous Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote more than 60 plays and is the only person to be awarded an Oscar as well as a Nobel Prize for Literature for the same film, Pygmalion. It’s believed that Shaw suffered from ADD (attention deficit disorder). Although he was a co-founder of the London School of Economics, he did not like formal education, noting that "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents."
 

Jeanne Betancourt

Award winning author Jeanne Betancourt is beloved for her Pony Pals book series. Two of the characters in her books, Brian in My Name is Brain Brian and Anna in the Pony Pals, are both dyslexic. She has publicly spoken out about her dyslexia, sharing that she believes being dyslexic helped her as a writer, and explaining that, "Since learning to read and write was difficult for me growing up, I paid more attention to the world around me. I watched and listened carefully to people for clues to what people were thinking and feeling." As a dyslexic, she better developed her skills as a storyteller.

Richard Ford

Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and a dyslexic. He’s famous for The Sportswriter and its sequels, as well as his short story collection Rock Springs. He has mild dyslexia, but he did not let his disability keep him from developing a love of literature. In fact, he believes that dyslexia actually helped him become a better reader as the disability made him slow down and be thoughtful about the books, sharing that "being slow made me pore over sentences and to be receptive to those qualities in sentences that were not just the cognitive aspect of sentences but were in fact the "poetical" aspects of language…those qualities in language are as likely to carry weight and hold meaning and give pleasure as the purely cognitive, though of course we can’t fundamentally separate those things, although the information age does its best."
 

Jules Verne

Jules Verne pioneered the science fiction genre and inspired steampunk. He is most famous for his novels, including A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Around the World in Eighty Days. As a student, he was more interested in writing than working in other subjects. He didn’t do well in school, and often complained of having a hard time focusing. Although undiagnosed, it’s believed that Verne may have had a form of ADD or ADHD. 

Read the rest of the post, featuring 15 more authors with learning disabilities, on the Bachelors Degree Online site.

This post, by Christine M. Grote, originally appeared on her Random Thoughts From Midlife blog on 8/24/11.

I’m going to share a few tips with you I’ve learned about putting pictures on the web, and about WordPress in particular. If you use Blogger or some other software, I don’t know how much of this will apply, but you might pick up a tip or two.

Sometimes I find inserting and formatting images into posts the most frustrating challenge of blogging. You may already know all of this, and more. Feel free to move on, or stay and enlighten us with a comment about a tip or two you may know. Don’t miss the Eiffel Tower photos at the end.

Let me start by saying I am far from being an expert. What I know I’ve learned largely from trial and error.

Here’s what the WordPress “Add New Post” screen looks like. I got this photo from taking a screen shot on my Mac by holding down the keys: command-shift-3. The computer saves a png file of the image on my screen to my desktop. I can open the saved file with my photo editing software, in this case photoshop, and crop it to whatever I want. PCs come with a “print screen” button that saves the image to your clipboard where you can paste it into a new file in your image editing software like photoshop or elements. I learned this about the PC this morning from this website where I also learned a few more tips about saving a screen shot on a mac. I’ll go back and look at it in more detail later.

Beside the circled Upload/Insert Image button, are the other buttons for uploading and inserting video, audio, media, poll, and custom form. I might have uploaded a video before, but otherwise I haven’t tried out any of these other buttons. When you click the insert image this is the next screen you get:

Read the rest of the post on Christine M. Grote‘s Random Thoughts From Midlife blog.

After spending months writing about a bleak future, I found myself feeling depressed and negative. I even considered giving up writing gritty crime novels—if that’s what it took to stay positive. Then while working on a nonfiction book, I came across my notes for a talk I gave at the library called Why I Read and Write Crime Fiction. It reminded me of the genre’s value and why I should continue to write it and why it’s good for readers too, including the president. Here’s a shortened version of my talk.

Crime fiction confronts the realities of life across various cultures more often and more honestly than mainstream/literary fiction does. Crime novels are suited to exploring provocative social issues and showing how those hot-button subjects affect various people’s lives, often from diverse perspectives.

Crime fiction can be surprisingly poignant and analytical about problems such as illegal immigration, human trafficking, and drug use. These novels highlight deep-rooted cultural ills such as racism, sexism, bigotry, and the dangers of stereotypes. Sometimes a mystery will show a stereotype in all its glory, reminding us of why stereotypes exist and how we all fit into one … at least a little bit. The crime genre often forces us to see the world from perspectives that make us think outside our comfort zone.

As crime writers and readers, we get to make sense of things that would otherwise haunt us. We learn why the family next door disappeared one day or what’s really going on in the creepy warehouse across the street. Sometimes that knowledge helps us sleep better and sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we learn one version of the truth.

Police procedurals and thrillers give us a medium through which we can experience the triumph of good over evil. For short while with each story, we get to be the good guy, the hero who rescues the kidnapped child or saves the president’s life. We get to drag the bad guys off to jail or shoot them dead if “they need killing”— fantasies we can’t act out in our everyday lives. The real-world events around us can be unjust and inexplicable. It’s important to our collective mental health to experience justice, order, and revelation through fiction.

Novels with well-written protagonists and antagonists bring us to terms with the duality within ourselves. Humans are all deeply flawed, with the capacity for great goodness as well as for deceit, jealousy, schadenfreude, addiction, selfishness, and often worse. When crime fiction heroes—detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors—possess such flaws, we not only relate to those characters, we forgive ourselves for the same shortcomings. When a killer calls his mother or pets a stray dog, we hate him a little less and remember to look for good qualities in everyone.

Crime novels explore relationships in a way that few other genres can. What better mechanism to test a bond between husband and wife, parent and child, or lifelong friends than to embroil the relationship in a crime, either as victims, suspects, or perpetrators. Similar to natural disasters, the aftermath of a crime can bring out the best—or worst—in humans.

The genre is also rich with possibilities for exploring the complexity of the human condition. Victims become predators; predators become victims. A person is guilty, but not in the way we’ve been led to believe. Most of all, crime fiction is full of surprises, and we readers love the unexpected. When was the last time a reviewer used the word twist when discussing a literary novel?

Why do you read and/or write crime fiction? Does it ever get you down?
 

This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on Crime Fiction Collective.

This article, by Hernán Iglesias Illa, originally appeared on the Publishing Perspectives site on 8/5/11.

Online start-ups Byliner and The Atavist have established a market for stories too long for magazines and too short for books.

NEW YORK: How long should a book be? For more than a century, publishers and authors have understood that most commercial books, to be profitable and viable, should come in around 250 pages, give or take a hundred or two. With the popularization of e-books, though, the restraints of the paper-based industry no longer apply, but new standards are still evolving. How long should an e-book be?

Two American startups, Byliner and The Atavist, are looking for an answer to this question in the middle ground between 5,000 word magazine articles and 100,000 words books. Earlier this year, both started publishing creative non-fiction titles that are too long to fit into a magazine or too short to fill a book.

They don’t call them “e-books” (Byliner refers to them as “originals”) and they don’t price them like regular e-books, either. While most digital versions of print books retail for around $10 in stores like Amazon or iBooks, Byliner’s ($0.99 to $5.99) and The Atavist’s ($1.99 or $2.99) pieces are much cheaper. And both share the revenue with the authors, who get 50% of what the editors receive.

They also had a promising start. Byliner’s first two articles hit the New York Times’ bestseller list for digital products, and The Atavist’s app for the iPad and the iPhone has been downloaded more than 40,000 times, according to the company.

John Tayman, CEO and co-founder of Byliner, started thinking about these issues a few years ago, after emerging from the three years he devoted to writing The Colony (Scribner), a book about an infamous leprosy colony in Hawaii. Tayman, who had been a magazine writer and editor for most of his career, found himself realizing that the stories he really wanted to write and read were longer than traditional magazine articles, but shorter than books. “I wanted stories that, as a reader, I could deal with in two or three hours,” says Tayman from his office in San Francisco. “And, as a writer, I wanted stories that I could get off my desk in one month or two, instead of a year or two.”

Read the rest of the article on Publishing Perspectives.

This post, by Moonrat, originally appeared on Editorial Ass on 8/4/10. Though it’s over a year old, it’s still pretty on-point.

The other day, I received a sad email from a reader who has decided to go the route of self-publishing. This person wanted to know why I–and others in New York publishing–had so little respect for people who chose to self-publish.

When I got this note, I realized we had some clearing up to do. I haven’t talked about self-publishing much here lately, so perhaps that is the origin of the confusion, but I personally have nothing against people who self-publish, nor against the self-pub industry. In fact–if you can keep a secret–I freelanced for a large self-pub company for a long time, helping authors polish their books, etc. I know a lot about who chooses to self-publish, why, and what advantages and disadvantages they have. I also know the huge amount of work they undertake. But certainly I respect their choice, and respect the people who make that choice.

But publication is a choice–if you’re in the throes of the submission process, this is sometimes hard to remember, but do remember you always, always have a choice whether or not you publish. You also have a choice how you’re going to publish, and what kind of publication to pursue.

So I’ve compiled this list of the pros and cons of each of several publishing options (and trust me, each has pros AND cons). I have worked, as you now know, at big companies, small companies, and self-pub companies, and thusly declare myself a creature without bias (or pretty darn close). Of course, every publication experience is different. These are just generalizations culled from the best and the worst of my observations.

I have, rather snobbishly, lined up these options in the order of what (mostly) everyone starts out hoping for, then what they hope to settle for, etc. But I hope this pro/con list illuminates that all such distinctions are relative.

BIG HOUSE PUBLICATION
pros:
*Huge, powerful sales force. I put this first because it’s perhaps the most important quality of a big house, whether consumers realize it or not. The reason most bestsellers come from big houses is because big houses have the most comprehensive and powerful sales teams, which have the best marketing sponsorship and thereby the biggest laydowns (first printings) and sell-ins (stocking numbers in national chains). So by default, they also have the best track records for numbers of copies sold–book buyers tend to buy what they see in stores. So chicken-egg-chicken etc. If you want your book to be a bestseller, your best bet is the big house route.

*Money, money, money. The big houses are giant corporate cash cows, often with private company or bajillionaire overlords (::cough Rupert Murdoch cough cough::). This means a lot of things:

*The possibility of a substantial advance (although these aren’t universal, so don’t get your hopes too far up).

*More personnel, so more people working on publicity, marketing, production, etc, with all the benefits that come from crack specialist teams.

*These personnel are usually paid more than their indie counterparts, which means (in theory) they may be the top of their game.

*Bigger possibilities for publicity and marketing budgets.

cons:

Read the rest of the post on Editorial Ass.

In Mike Duran’s post How Do We “Glorify God” in Our Writing? I discovered I wasn’t the only person asking if you can write a Christian story without specifically mentioning God.

As Mike points out, it seems most Christian writers (and I would say most Christians) think you absolutely must include God specifically in a story in order for it to be Christian:

…And, sadly, that’s what many folks mean by glorifying God in their writing. For most Christian writers, glorifying God is all about their message. It means not backing away from the Gospel and not avoiding references to Christ in their novel. It means developing content that is virtuous, redemptive, and spiritually uplifting.

Which leads me to ask: Can only writers of explicit “Christian content” glorify God in their writing?…

IF NOT — if only Christian writers can glorify God in Christian stories — then how can a Christian ever hope to “do all to the glory of God”?

IF SO — if Christians can glorify God in whatever kind of story they write (or task, service, job they perform) — then how is glorifying God in a Christian story any different than glorifying God in a “secular” story?…

This is a question I’ve struggled with for years. I enjoy reading secular fantasy. I’ve tried reading Christian fantasy, but found it lacking (although I really enjoy Christian thrillers like This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti). My natural inclination is to write secular fantasy, but I feel compelled to follow the path writing greats like C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien have blazed. They wrote what they wanted to read because what they wanted wasn’t already abundantly available.

I want to write Christian fantasy that I would want to read, which may or may not explicitly mention God. But would it be considered Christian if I don’t get explicit about the Gospel?

So, what do you think? Should writers mention God in order for their work to be considered Christian, or can a Christian writer “glorify God” without getting specific?

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

This will probably be the last index published until late September/early October as I have a pretty busy schedule  coming up over the next two months. I suspect as we move closer to the financial quarter four for 2011, there will be quite a number of changes with a the companies I include in the index. There are one or two publishing services that I don’t expect to see surviving into 2012, and there are also a few at the bottom I am considering removing because of their poor showing, lack of foresight and development, and output.

The index takes a great deal of time to put together, and it involves following and analyzing not just the 70 companies included here, but a further 50+ on the edge of entering the index. As always, I would ask companies to keep me updated on what they perceive to be improvements to their services, but again, as always in my correspondence with them; don’t spam me with correspondence about actual books. I am not interested. The Publishing Index was set up to review your company services and it is not a device or platform to promote your authors or books. What matters to me is the value of your services, experienced by your authors.

Let me once again thank the authors and companies who regularly feed me back with updates, experiences and information which all goes into producing the Publishing Index chart every month. Your input is invaluable and always welcome.

Beyond my own reviews on each company (which plays a small part in each company’s index evaluation), all the data gathered is entirely subjective and based on positive and negative correspondence and formulaic analysis. I deliberately avoid making my own comments when the chart is produced and published each month, in so far as highlighting movements of significance in the index. It should speak for itself if followed closely. The companies in the top 20 are there for a reason, because they follow and respect the core values a good self-publishing service should offer. If you want to know what those vales are then you’d best go here to read the book I published on self-publishing, or here, to read the articles I have written on the values I believe should exist in self publishing.

For now, here is the [publishing service] index for August [2011]…

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney’s The Independent Publishing Magazine.