How to Read Your Way to Better Writing

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This post, by Susan Bearman, originally appeared on Write It Sideways.

Writers write. But writers also read … at least we should.

My own to-be-read pile is officially as tall as my house, so I’m as guilty as the next writer of neglecting the reading part of my life, but this is a mistake.

I once heard that authors write only half of a novel; readers write the other half, and every time a book is read (or reread) it is rewritten.

 

I think this is brilliant and I wish I knew who said it first. It reminds us of the unique synergy between writer and reader (who usually don’t ever meet) in creating the world of the story that only starts on the page, but is transformed into something greater and completely new as the words are read.

But how can we use our reading to make our writing better?

1. Renew Your Love of Reading

Do you remember the first book you ever loved, perhaps one that was read to you over and over again as a child? Or the first book you read all by yourself? Or that love story you read as a teenager that made you fall in love with falling in love?

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” — Ernest Hemingway

I’m wiling to bet there isn’t a writer, dead or alive, who hasn’t been transformed by reading. But when was the last time you got lost in a wonderful story?

If you believe, as I do, that writers do half the work and readers do the other half, then the act of reading is an act of writing.

Maybe we need a new word to describe this phenomenon, but for right now, make a writerly commitment to enjoy reading on a regular basis. Make a date with the library or that pile of books on your nightstand, and rediscover the joy of reading.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more specific points about how reading can improve your writing, on Write It Sideways.

The Last Victim – A New Novel About the Consequences of Obsession, Lies, and Deception

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Novel

Plot summary: From the first moment Sophie Rothman lies to her husband about the child she is carrying, the lives of everyone in her family are changed forever.

Driven by a twisted obsession to accumulate money for its own sake, Sophie forces her family to live beneath their means and drives her husband, Harry, away. During his absence, Sophie’s loneliness leads her into an illicit affair and an unwanted pregnancy. When her lover leaves, Sophie begs Harry to return and then deceives him into believing the child she’s carrying is his. If Sophie keeps her secret, no one will be hurt. Or will they? It’s a question Sophie will have to answer one day.

Jeanie, the product of Sophie’s affair, grows into a beautiful, strong-willed woman who defies her mother at every turn and becomes an archaeologist. Destiny takes Jeanie to Masada—one of the greatest archaeological digs of all time—where she falls in love with David. When Jeanie announces her plans to marry, Sophie is forced to reveal her long-guarded secret and forbid the marriage.

The events set in motion by Sophie’s revelation catapult Jeanie to a near breakdown and tear the Rothman family apart. On Jeanie’s final journey, she draws on all her courage to confront her mother and break the bonds that bind and sometimes destroy.

The Last Victim is a riveting saga about the consequences of obsession, lies and deception. It is a story spanning three decades—from the streets of Brooklyn, New York in the 1940s to the streets of Jerusalem and the harsh desert sands of Masada in the 1960s. Here is a multi-layered portrait of Jewish-American life during a turbulent time in America, and the deep connection to Israel’s fight to survive in the Middle East. Against this rich historical background, powerful characters clash in conflict after conflict as they struggle to fulfill their dreams.

Get the paperback novel, “The Last Victim,” for only $14.95
Get the E-Book novel, “The Last Victim,” for only $9.95

* The E-Book is available in 3 file formats – (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) and readable on all devices. You get all 3 files for $9.95.

* The E-book is also available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Goodreads.

*Visit www.elainebossik.com for more information.

Author

ELAINE BOSSIK had three careers: as magazine editor, medical writer and teacher in the New York City school system. She received BA and MS degrees from Brooklyn College (City University of New York), and now serves as a staff columnist for Scriptologist.com, writing how-to articles for aspiring screenwriters under the name of Elaine Radford. 

While her professional experience helped shape her writing, her fascination with people—their motivations and the everyday dramas they create—is the inspiration for her fiction. She believes that really great stories begin and end with provocative characters.

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY and as a young adult traveling in Israel, she found the rich details for the events that take place in this novel.

Do Indie Authors Deserve More Respect?

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This post, by Suze Reese, originally appeared on her site on 2/16/12.

NOTE: Let me add to this post that I am a BIG FAN of indie writers and indie fiction. This post is totally pro-both! My hope is add to the discussion of how to help indies who are serious about their work compete in the market place and not be unfairly branded as junk.

Earlier this week, while preparing for Tuesday’s I HEART YA Blog Carnival, I was dismayed to see that my list of exciting, upcoming 2012 YA releases did not include many indie authors. There have been predictions that 2012 would be the year of the indie author. And maybe it will be. Or maybe Amanda Hocking and and John Locke are anomalies whose success won’t be repeated.

Are readers becoming more discriminating with their dollars? Do they expect a fully-edited manuscript even if they only pay a buck? One can hope so. There are some authors out there who tout the lack of a need for editing indie books. I’ve even heard it said that editing means nothing more than removing an author’s voice. I won’t make that an exact quote, but I will say I think that it is pure rubbish.

Let me make this perfectly clear: I believe every manuscript deserves to be edited, and no author can edit their own manuscript. The author already knows what happens next, or what the main character is thinking. There is just no way they can see the flaws of their own story. And you can quote me on that.

IndieAuthors.com recently gave four reasons for Indie Authors not getting respect. I suggest reading the full article, but I’ll make a quick summary:

 

Read the rest of the post on Suze Reese’s site.

KDP Select's Effect on a Reader Who Writes

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This post, by Dan H. Kind, originally appeared on his Read Write Myth Dharma blog on 3/2/12.

 Yeah, sure, I’m a writer. But before that I was a reader, which I still am to this day. It’s my hobby. It’s my escape. It’s my Water of Life. And I wanted to tell you what KDP Select has done for me as a lifelong lover of stories told through the written word.

Two months ago my Kindle Touch was nice and light, filled with stuff I’d bought with hard-earned cash and really, really wanted to read, even if I paid a mere dollar for it. These days it’s a bloated, word-filled beast I drag around the house with me like an old wooden leg.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read and enjoyed some of the free offerings I’ve picked up recently, and gone and purchased other stuff by that author (Ann Charles, notably, on the list below, who I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, cozy mysteries not usually being my thing, but the book was fun and well-written). Those with one book . . . give me more! And I’ll buy it next time (which is what people did a distant few months ago to get books). I will gladly pay for a book from an author I know will entertain me for a few hours. I don’t think this recent glut of free has changed that attitude in many readers.

Below are the books I’ve downloaded onto my Kindle since January 1st. The books in boldface I purchased; the books with links I’ve read. I only download stuff that I’m pretty damn sure I’ll like, even if it’s free.

If my count is correct, [my chart contains] 105 total downloads since January 1st.

22 paid, 83 free.

Of the 22 paid, I’ve so far read 7, just started on the 8th.

Of the 83 free, I’ve read 10—and 5 of those are short stories by the same author, Christian Cantrell, which I very much enjoyed and whose new offerings I will be purchasing from now on.

And the percentage winner is . . . the paid stuff, hands-down.

It used to be at least fairly easy to pick out what I’d be reading next. Now, I’m drowning in a sea of free. And I’m a bibliophile. I usually devour a novel in a day or three. Or four. Or seven. It all depends. But it might take me years to get to some of this stuff, especially since there are many authors, both established and indie, who if they come out with a new book I’ve gotta dash out as soon as payday hits and buy it and read it and funk everything else that’s been sitting on the bookshelf, physical or digital, for however long.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes the chart listing all of Kind’s downloaded ebooks, free and purchased, since January 1st, on Read Write Myth Dharma.

Writers, Reviewing

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This post, by Moriah Jovan, originally appeared on her site on 3/6/11.

The last year or so (by my completely unscientific method of measuring time, which is to say, “It feels like a year, what, it was only a week, it wasn’t a year? It felt like a year…”), there have been increasing conversations across Romancelandia about whether writers (especially those writers who are not Nora Roberts) should review books and give them less-than-glowing reviews.

It’s coming to a head now.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

Eh, I don’t really care about reviewing books from Romancelandia. There are A LOT of books and A LOT of romance readers, and so other people do that just fine. More to the point, I don’t really care to review, because some books seriously just piss me off and then my head would explode online and that’s always a mess to clean up. Actually, the only books I really want to write about are the ones that piss me off, and so that would skew my blog the other way, making me look like a recidivist toxic bitch.

Oh. Wait…

Anyway, I’ve reviewed some books. I’ve pretty much stopped reviewing books, except for a notation here and there on my Reading List. I’m on the fence about the “be nice and also it could wreck your career” versus “I’m a reader too and I have a right to review honestly and fuck you if you don’t like what I say, especially if I paid money for your book and spent time I could’ve been making money to read it.” I just hate feeling taken advantage of by a bad book, in both money and time.

 

Read the rest of the post on Moriah Jovan’s site, and also see this follow-up post on the same site.

The Hunger Games, Hype and Adults Reading YA

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Like so many people, I’ve just read The Hunger Games. I read it because I wanted to know what all the hype was about. The books on their own were a big success, then big budget movie moguls took them on and the production company engaged in a massive online hype campaign. Also, a friend suggested I read them, as he thought they were pretty good. So I did. Meh.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

I probably won’t go to see the movie, but, in case I did, I wanted to read the book first. The book is always better than the film, after all. And so many people have waxed lyrical about The Hunger Games, I thought it must be worth a try. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed at first. The book drags interminably with an unnecessary amount of worldbuilding and backstory. It’s called The Hunger Games, for fuck’s sake – the games really should start before I’m halfway through the book. They do, just, at around the 40% mark or so, but that’s way too late. I was moaning online about it and one person said, and I paraphrase, “Yeah, I read that book. I’m sure there’s a pretty good novella in there somewhere.”

That was a fairly accurate comment. However, when the games got underway, and kids were running around trying to survive and kill each other, my interest was hooked. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about, The Hunger Games is the story of a post-apocalyptic kind of future where the masses are entertained every year with one boy and one girl from each of twelve districts dumped into a wilderness arena where they have to hunt and kill each other for televisual shits and giggles. There can be only one and so on. Also, if you haven’t heard about The Hunger Games, how’s that rock you’re living under?

So, as I said, the games themselves were good. It was interesting stuff, exciting in its own way and I finally found myself enjoying the story. I could understand what some of the fuss was about. It wasn’t brilliant, certainly not worth the level of hype, but it was pretty good. That first 40% of the book, however, should really have been, at most, 10%. The whole thing would have been much better. And as a book for young adults, it doesn’t need to be a huge tome.

So I could kind of understand where the affection for the books came from. Whether I’ll bother with parts two and three remains to be seen. While I ended up enjoying the last half of the book on a very superficial level, it didn’t take away from the many, many flaws. The vast majority of the worldbuilding and the concepts on which the entire story is built are very contrived. There’s a lot of forced convenience in the telling. But this is okay when you’re just having a casual read. It’s not claiming to be anything else.

The dicussion on Facebook also raised another point, when someone said, essentially, “You’re reading a book for children, so you should be bored”.

I was astounded at that. There’s a vast chasm between writing/storytelling that is simpler and less sophisticated than adult fiction and writing/storytelling that is boring. Kids get bored too. To suggest a book for teens should bore an adult is asinine. It would bore a child too. A story aimed at a teen/YA audience certainly won’t have the depth and complexity of an adult novel, but should still be an engaging and entertaining story. When you read something like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials, there’s nothing boring about those. Except the last Harry Potter book, which should have been called Harry Potter And The Interminable Emo Camping*. Seriously, that book should have been half the size and it would have been great. But that’s a whole other rant.

The Harry Potter stories and the Dark Materials books are not boring, even though they’re aimed at a YA audience. They’re interesting and well-paced throughout, and they deal with subjects which challenge the thinking of their YA audience, just like YA fiction should. We should never write down to young people – they’re smarter than you might think. The Hunger Games deals with themes which should challenge YA readers too – kids as young as 12 running around killing other kids as young as 12 for sport, for instance. The whole premise of the book seems well outside a YA purview. Perhaps that very fact alone is what’s made The Hunger Games so popular. And that story, contrived and flawed though it may be, isn’t boring. The first 40% of the book is boring, however, and it shouldn’t be. To suggest we ought to find it boring as adults reading YA is ridiculous.

It should simply have been a shorter book, with all that worldbuilding and backstory tightened right up so that we got into the excitement of the Games themselves sooner. At least, that’s my opinion. And you all know how much I like to share an opinion.

SPOILER AHEAD!

One more thing before I go – I have one MAJOR issue with this story. I’ve saved this for the end, because it’s a real spoiler if you haven’t read the book. So, if you want to read it, maybe you should skip this last bit. I mean, the whole story is utterly predictable from the outset. That’s the lack of sophistication I was talking about earlier, which doesn’t have to be boring in a well-written story. But…

We know damn well that Katniss is going to survive. We know almost certainly that Peeta will survive too, somehow, or die doing something to ensure Katniss survives. From the very opening scenes, we know how this thing is going to play out, but we’re happy to go along for the ride.

There are several problems with it, which I really can’t be bothered to go into now any more than I have already and, in truth, it doesn’t matter. I still enjoyed the book and I’m glad it’s popular and getting young people reading. Top work.

But, right towards the end, there’s a surprise twist thrown in that’s just fucking mental. What the holy god-dancing shit is that thing with the dead tributes all coming back as werewolves? Or something. Seriously, what the shit, Suzanne Collins? All these kids had been killed in various ways. Many of them we don’t know how they died, but they did. Then they’re suddenly all werewolves come out to screw around with the final battle between our heroes and the one surviving tribute. It’s utterly bizarre. Why are they werewolves? How are they werewolves? What the fuck is the point in suddenly throwing that in at the end?

Sure, if you wanted some extra excitement, throw in some random attacker to mess with the balance of things. Even a pack of genetically modified wolves or something. But why the dead kids from before? Dead, remember? No longer freaking living.

And, just as a matter of detail, if Katniss, Peeta and Cato hadn’t managed to get onto the Cornucopia and have their last little scrap up there, that pack of wolfchildren would have torn all three of them to pieces and there would have been no victor, so letting those werekids out at all makes no sense.

Anyway, I’ll stop ranting now.

* I can’t take credit for that title. I can’t remember where I heard it, but it’s perfect.

 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

A Feast Of Data To Interpret In New Pew Survey Of Book Readers About Ebooks

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 4/5/12.

There are a few gems to interpret in the just-released Pew survey of ebook reading.

1. We are getting very close to half (they report 43%) of Americans 16 and older saying they have read a book or other long-form content in digital format in the past year. As other data in the survey suggest, this number is still rising rapidly.

This number is an index of how much of the reading public can be reached without print. Since elsewhere in the data it is reported that only 78% of the people 16 and over have read a book in any format in the past 12 months, it appears that more than half the book readers can be reached without print already.

2. Pew tracked some startling growth around Christmas. Just before the holiday, 17% of Americans 18 and over (sometimes they seem to measure “adult” from age 16, sometimes from age 18) had read an ebook in the previous 12 months. But right after the holiday, that number had jumped to 21%. Remembering that 22% of the population hadn’t read a book at all in the past 12 months, that means that about 27% of book readers report having read an ebook recently. And that number jumped nearly 25% in a month!

3. One of the most startling data points reported is that both tablet ownership and ereader ownership had just about doubled over Christmas, from 10% in mid-December to 19% in mid-January in both cases. With overlap accounted for, Pew estimates that 28% of Americans 18 and over own one or both.

Device ownership is still climbing fast, although it is likely that the overlap, a single person owning both devices, grew faster over this Christmas than it had before. When people get a second device, a replacement or a complementary device, they probably don’t indulge in the same buying spurt as they do when they get their first device. The data summary I saw didn’t correlate the rise in ownership of each of the two devices with the rise in ownership of either of the two devices, which limits our ability to forecast how much content growth we should see following the increase in device penetration.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

I Was Wrong: Sometimes A Sex Scene Really IS Needed

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/3/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

I recently reached the halfway point in my next novel. I sat back, smiled, and drew in a giant breath of relief…

Then I almost fell out of my chair. Swear to God, if you were there, you would have seen the whites of my eyes. Yes, folks, there was horror: plain, raw, and oh, so very real.

Horror because I came to a shocking realization, that I had to do something I vowed I would never do in one of my books. Not only had I made that vow, but I’d made it with fists pounding, lips pursed in utter defiance, right here on this blog, indelibly written for all of cyberspace to see.

I said would never put a sex scene in one of my novels.

And I quote. On November 8, 2011, I said this:

Sure, a romp in the hay would be good fun and all, but there’s a time and place for everything, and if some killer’s got a bullet with their name on it, they’re not going to be thinking about getting it on; they’re going to be thinking about getting the hell out. Period.

And this:

Besides that, in suspense, pacing is everything, and it seems to me this would only slow things down, and if it doesn’t serve a purpose, isn’t it just gratuitous?

And, of course, there was this:

And then there’s the predictability factor. It’s just too easy.

Ouch.

Little did I know those words would come back to bite me on the ass with the sort of vengeance only an author could dream up, and that I’d be forced to eat every one of them with a fork and spoon.

So here I go. I’m just going to come right out and say it now.

I was wrong.

There, I said it.

It’s not like I want to have sex (in my book). The fact is, during my relatively short career as an author, I’ve managed to avoid it at all costs (Well…there was that one part in my first novel where the two protagonists almost did, but I gently avoided that trap by ending the story just in time).

However, this time around, there will be no avoidance. My. Characters. Must. Have. Sex. Not only must they have sex, but they must have mad, passionate, crazy-assed sex. Why? Because the plot dictates it, and if they don’t, I’ll lose my credibility as an author (and trust me when I say, if there were a way out of it, I’d so be there).

I’m not going to give away the story, but let’s just say there’s this certain femme fatal. She’s bad news. Real bad. And during the heat of passion, she reveals a deep dark secret about herself. Of course, my protagonist being a typical dude, is too busy enjoying the pleasures of the flesh to pay any attention to it, and it’s only years later that it comes back to haunt him.

 See what I mean?

The fact is I’d do anything to not have to write this scene (have I mentioned that?). I don’t even like to read them. But life does have strange and interesting ways of teaching us things, and this, without a doubt, has to be one of the strangest. And humbling. So when the truth reveals itself, you can do one of two things: you either swallow your pride and try to learn something, or you go the way of fools. Guess which way I’m headed.

So what has Drew learned?

   1. I will never say never again (because one day I just might have to).

   2. Yes, there is a place for sex in suspense thrillers (he said, rolling his eyes).

   3. It’s important to admit when you’re wrong: I was wrong (he muttered, grudgingly).

Now I need to figure out how to write the damned thing.

Twitter 10,000

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This post, by Joel Friedlander, originally appeared on The Book Designer on 3/26/12.

When I checked my Twitter account this morning (@JFBookman) I had 9,951 followers. Over the next day or two I expect this number to click over, like the odometer in your car, to 10,000. This comes with a variety of responses:

  • Surprise: What took so long?
  • Incredulity: You mean you really like me?
  • Malaise: Does anyone care?
  • Humility: That’s a lot of people to answer to!

Does having a lot of people listening influence me? A little bit, but I’ve been pretty focused on curating my Twitter stream, keeping it on the topics I write about. In that sense, I do think a lot about readers, and what’s most useful that I can provide.

Maybe because of that care, Twitter is my most important social media investment, the place I enjoy spending time and where I’ve put in the most work to establish a robust “outpost,” made the most new friends, created the most connections.

But here’s what’s really interesting to me. It took me two years of almost daily work to reach this milestone. Does this seem like a good thing? You could get 10,000 Twitter followers today:

twitter followers

So what’s the difference? Why spend all that time and energy if you could just spend a couple of hundred dollars and be done with it?

The Difference, Explained

What makes a community of interest? That’s the question that has guided me on Twitter over the last couple of years.

Sure, I enjoy Facebook once in a while, there’s no better way to find that cute girl who sat behind you in American History class all those years ago. That’s fun.

But for me at least, it doesn’t equate to business, and there’s no community of interest in that kind of connection.

You can also find community on Google+, a service that allows for longer text and lots of other goodies, but that isn’t where I’ve spent my time.

Twitter seems to attract certain types. As a long-time word buff and writer, the 140-character limit to your posts on Twitter seemed more like a delightful challenge than a restriction. It reminded me of the strict rules certain kinds of poetry require and the fun of working your words into a form.

A Little History, Please

Although I signed up for Twitter early in 2009, I never used my account until later that year. The stimulus was starting my blog in the fall of that year.

At the time, the people who had massive followings amazed me. How did they get all those people to listen to what they had to say?

Now, celebrities of all kinds are on Twitter, and tweets appear every day on cable news shows and at presidential debates. Twitter continues to make news as the communication medium of choice for social upheavals as well as for companies who want to use social media to influence buyers’ behavior.

But for bloggers (and authors who blog), Twitter has two blockbuster attributes that make it a desirable destination:

  1. There’s no better way to connect to influencers and thought leaders in your niche, whatever it is
  2. There’s no easier way to find that community of interest that can multiply your communication efforts

How to Find 10,000 People Who Want to Follow You

Compared to the really big Twitter followings, 10,000 isn’t much. Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian 14,214,322 followers) probably gains or loses 10,000 followers in a typical day.

In book publishing, Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman 149,080 followers) towers over most of us. Michael Hyatt, blogger and head of Thomas Nelson, is doing well (@MichaelHyatt 115,988).

In the indie publishing niche, my pal Joanna Penn (@TheCreativePenn) makes me look rather mouselike, with her 25,721 followers.

But here’s the thing: 10,000 is a heck of a lot of people. The biggest group I’ve ever spoken live to was about 400 people, and that filled a pretty good-sized room.

So, how do you get all those followers? Here’s my simple 3-step formula:

  1. Find people who are interested in the same topics you’re passionate about
  2. Follow those people
  3. Post useful, amusing or educational content with links to resources, mostly not your own

That’s not too hard, is it? Just rinse and repeat for a couple of years.

This is slow, by the way, unless you’re willing to spend hours at it each day. Most of us have other things to do.

A lot of this regular day-to-day posting can be handled through nifty software like HootSuite, which allows you to schedule a bunch of posts at one time that will then be delivered at specific times.

What I like about this slow growth is this: I know that virtually every follower on my list is involved in writing, publishing, design or a related field. That’s what I was looking for when I began the search for that community of interest.

And it works! Twitter is the second-largest source of traffic to my blog, and I consider the people behind all those accounts part of the community here.

In the End, Gratitude

More than anything else, I’m left with a feeling of gratitude to all the people who’ve helped me along the way. People who re-tweeted my posts when I first got started, people who posted great content themselves that was ready to pass along to others.

And the people who served as models of how to engage on social media in general, and Twitter specifically. You can’t help but learn when you follow great people, the ones who care about helping other people to succeed.

And also to my assistant, Shelley Sturgeon of E-Vantage Business Services, who attends to all those things I seem to forget about.

Looking Forward

When authors ask about diving into social media, I always tell them that they’ll be most successful with the service that they enjoy the most.

Long term, you’ve got to be getting something more from a social media site than drudgery. Try them all to find the one that feels most comfortable to you.

I believe Twitter will eventually grow to “utility” status, like gas, electricity or telephone service. It’s such a neutral communication medium that it can be used in lots of different ways.

Apple seemed to be moving in the same direction since integrating Twitter functions into the operating system for its mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Maybe someday soon we’ll all be connected to each other seamlessly, and everyone will have their “@” address issued at birth. But by then, the whole concept of “followers” will have faded into history.

Since that day isn’t here quite yet, I’m going to go raise a glass and toast the power of social media. I think there’s no place else you can see so clearly the wisdom of marketer and motivational guru, Zig Zigler:

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

Self-Mentoring – an Idea for the Twenty-First Century

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This post, by Avil Beckford, originally appeared on The Invisible Mentor on 3/26/12. Indie authors and micropresses are forging new trails, and as such, most are obliged to self-mentor, whether they know it or not.

Numerous survey results tout the benefits of having a mentor. However, many of us will never be a part of a traditional mentoring relationship. So what do you do? Simple, you mentor yourself.

Self-mentoring is not a new concept, and according to Dr. Marsha L. Carr from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, “Self-mentoring occurs when the achiever (mentee) is willing to take the initiative while accepting responsibility for his/her own development by devoting time to navigate within the culture of his/her environment in order to make the most of opportunity to strengthen competencies needed to enhance job performance and career progression.”

That means that you are responsible for your own professional development.

Becoming a Self-Mentor

To mentor yourself, you have to know yourself, it’s a journey in self-awareness. You have to know your strengths, weaknesses, needs, values, limitations, passions, how you respond in various situations, and what’s really important to you. A good place to start is to conduct a Personal SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis, and do the mentoring needs assessment from the DIY Mentoring Program, Episode One.

After you have identified your needs, you have to go out there and identify ways to fill those needs. That’s not easy to do, and that’s why it requires commitment on your part. Self-mentoring is an important concept, and the Invisible Mentor is designed to help you mentor yourself, but it requires action on your part. You have to take the information and use it for your professional development.

Self-Mentoring on The Invisible Mentor Blog

To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interviews, while you are reading them, answer the following questions:

  1. Are their similarities between the interviewee and yourself?
  2. In what ways can you use the information?
  3. In what ways would you respond differently from the interviewee?
  4. What are your five takeaways from the interview?
  5. After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?
  6. What are five things you have learned that you can use in your job?

To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Profiles, while you are reading them, answer the following questions:

 

Read the rest of the article on The Invisible Mentor, and also see this follow-up post from the same site.

Prices For Ebooks On Kindle Could Tumble As Deal In Apple Book Price-Fixing Case Is Just 'Weeks Away'

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This article, by Rob Waugh, originally appeared on The Mail on 4/2/12.

  • Justice Department could halt price deal which prevented Amazon discounting
  • Deal between Apple and five publishers
  • Ebook prices risen up to 50% in last two years

Book prices on Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers could tumble after a deal in a major price-fixing case is said to be ‘close’.

America’s Justice Department is in the closing stages of a deal with Apple and major publishers.

The deal would call a halt to a deal struck by Apple which prevented publishers selling books via Amazon and other online stores at lower prices than via Apple’s iTunes Store.

The deal has seen prices for eBooks artificially inflated so that many cost the same – or even more than – their paper counterparts.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, for example, has been priced higher than the paper edition on ebook stores.

The deal could mean that pricing control over eBooks shifts from publishers to retailers such as Amazon, which would then be able to discount and offer sale prices to its consumers.

The news came in a Reuters report quoting unnamed sources.

‘It would be a positive for Amazon because the company’s greatest strength is as a high-volume, low-price retailer and the wholesale model plays into that,’ said Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen & Co.  

It’s unclear what sort of knock-on effect this deal would have for European consumers. The European Commission is already investigating alleged price-fixing in the eBook market.

The Justice Department is seeking to unravel agreements Apple secured from five publishers about two years ago, as the Silicon Valley company was launching its iPad and was seeking to break up Amazon’s dominance in the digital book market.

The publishers are Simon & Schuster Penguin Group, Macmillan, a unit of and HarperCollins.

 

Read the rest of the article on The Mail.

7 Similar but Distinct Word Pairs

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This post, by Mark Nichol, originally appeared on Daily Writing Tips.

Look-alike, sound-alike words can cause confusion. Note the distinctions between each pair of terms listed below:

1. Abjure and Adjure

Abjure, from Latin by way of French, means “to deny” or “to renounce,” or “to avoid.” Adjure, which took the same route to English, means “to confirm” or “to command,” or “to advise or urge.” In some senses, therefore, they are near antonyms. (That’s logical: Ab- means “from” and ad- means “to.”) However, they do share a root syllable, the same one that is the basis of jury, jurisprudence, just, justice, and other terms from the realm of law.

2. Chafe and Chaff

Chafe, ultimately derived from the Latin term calefacere, “to make warm or hot,” originally meant just that, but then, from the added sense of “rubbing to make warm,” it acquired the negative connotations of “make sore by rubbing” and then, by association, “irritate.” Chaff, an unrelated word, comes from Old English and refers to seed husks and, by extension, anything discarded as worthless. By association with the cloud of husks and other debris produced during threshing of grain, bursts of tiny scraps of metal ejected from aircraft to interfere with enemy radar is called chaff.

3. Discomfort and Discomfit

These similar-looking words have similar meanings, but it was not always so. Discomfort is the antonym of the word ultimately stemming from the Latin term confortare, meaning “to strengthen.” (Fort is also the root of, well, fort, as well as fortitude.) Discomfit, from the French word desconfit, meaning “defeated” (its Latin root means “to make”), was weakened by false association with discomfort to mean “frustrate” or “perplex.” Unlike the antonym for discomfort, comfit (“to make”) is not an antonym; it refers to candied fruit. Comfiture, however, is a rare synonym meaning “an act of support.”

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes four more word pairs, on Daily Writing Tips.

Free Books: Concord Free Press Creates New Nonprofit Publishing Model

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This article, by Madeleine Crum, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 3/30/12.

The cover of Castle Freeman Jr.’s sixth book, a collection of 12 stories set in the rural North East, has a few eye-catching elements: The image is of brittle grass and a rickety, abandoned home, an aesthetic matched by the rough texture of the cover.

More unusual, though, is the price tag situated above the bar code. This book costs $0.00.

 

"Round Mountain" is one of seven novels published so far by Concord Free Press, which, as its name implies, is a nonprofit that creates free printed books that can be requested via their site. The only condition is that the reader donates to a charity of their choice and passes the book along when they’re finished. The organization has so far raised over $260,000 for various charities including Planned Parenthood, local libraries and hurricane relief funds.

Its other titles include "The Next Queen Of Heaven" by "Wicked" author Gregory Maguire and "Give and Take," the fourth book by the press’ founder, Stona Fitch.

"My book was about generosity. It’s sort of a latter day Robin Hood story. This jazz player steals diamonds and BMWs then gives them away," Fitch told The Huffington Post on the telephone from the organization’s headquarters.

Although "Give and Take" was bought by a major literary imprint in 2007, the book was "abandoned" when Fitch’s editor left the industry. Faced with the choice of ditching or self-publishing his story, he instead decided to open his own company, employing the philosophy of a nonprofit farm he works with, which grows produce to donate to local shelters.

"My agent told me not to open the press. A lot of friends said I’d make a fool out of myself," Fitch says. "[But] writers have to be activists. I’m very much an activist. You can’t wait for publishing to figure it out for you."

Nestled above a bakery in Concord, Mass., the company takes pride in their humble philosophy and alternative to mainstream publishing houses. Three-and-a-half years in, Concord Free Press has published just six books using its unusual model.

 

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post.

Does Agency Pricing Lead to Higher Book Prices?

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This post, by Smashwords founder Mark Coker, originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 3/28/12. In it, Coker rebuts the widely-held contention that agency pricing drives up ebook prices.

According to a March 9 story in the Wall Street Journal, The U.S. Department of Justice is considering suing Apple and five large US publishers for allegedly colluding to raise the price of ebooks.

At the heart of the issue, I suspect, is concern over the agency pricing model. Agency pricing allows the publisher (or the indie author) to set the retail price of their book.

Although Smashwords is not a party to this potential lawsuit, I felt it was important that the DoJ investigators hear the Smashwords side of the story, because any decisions they make could have significant ramifications for our 40,000 authors and publishers, and for our retailers and customers.

Yesterday I had an hour-long conference call with the DoJ. My goal was to express why I think it’s critically important that the DoJ not take any actions to weaken or dismantle agency pricing for ebooks.

Even before the DoJ investigation, I understood that detractors of the agency model believed that agency would lead to higher prices for consumers.

Ever since we adopted the agency model, however, I had faith that in a free market ecosystem where the supply of product (ebooks) exceeds the demand, that suppliers (authors and publishers) would use price as a competitive tool, and this would naturally lead to lower prices.

I preparation for the DoJ call, I decided to dig up the data to prove whether my pie-in-the-sky supply-and-demand hunch was correct or incorrect. I asked Henry on our engineering team to sift through our log files to reconstruct as much pricing data as possible regarding our books at the Apple iBookstore.

We shared hard data with the DoJ yesterday that we’ve never shared with anyone. I’ll share this data with you now.

As background, Smashwords is one of several authorized aggregators supplying ebooks to the Apple iBookstore. On day one of the iPad’s launch, we had about 2,200 books in the iBookstore, and our catalog there has grown steadily ever since.

Henry was able to assemble a complete data set going back to October 2010. We created once-a-month snapshots of the Smashwords catalog at the Apple iBookstore between October 2010 and March 2012. Our data captures the average price of our titles in the iBookstore, and the number of titles listed.

I’m sharing four data sets. The first data set, …at left, shows the number of Smashwords titles for sale in the Apple iBookstore. As you can see, the numbers have grown steadily. I’m not aware of any other agency pricing study that worked against such a large body of data.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Smashwords blog.

What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on GigaOm on 3/27/12.

After months of anticipation, the e-book versions of author J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series are now available through Rowling’s Pottermore online unit, and as my PaidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted in her post on the launch, Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with her e-books, including releasing them without digital-rights management restrictions. Obviously, the success of the Potter series has given Rowling the ability to effectively dictate terms to just about anyone, even a powerhouse like Amazon, but there are still lessons that other book publishers should take from what she is doing.

 

One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the Kindle and Google’s e-book service (which is part of Google Play). And in keeping with Pottermore’s status as a standalone digital bookstore in its own right, users will be able to buy the books from the Rowling site and then send them to whichever platform they wish. As Laura points out, even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.

As we’ve pointed out before at GigaOM, one of the problems for users when it comes to the e-book landscape is the clash between competing platforms — with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble all trying to create their own walled gardens, where users can only access titles from publishers that have deals with the platform they happen to be using. Amazon and Apple in particular both seem to see books and other media content primarily as loss leaders that can help them lock users into their proprietary platforms, and recent skirmishes have seen Apple reject books that have links to Amazon’s store, and Barnes & Noble block Amazon titles from its store.

 

Read the rest of the post on GigaOm.