Amazon Must Kill the Kindle, and Other E-Book Reader Developments

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This article, by Erik Sherman, originally appeared on bnet on 1/8/10. It’s interesting to revisit the information and opinion contained within it eleven months later.

The line of announcements on the e-book reader front, both at CES and out in the rest of the world, has become prodigious. It seems like almost every week someone comes out with a new one. And that’s exactly the reason that, for the good of itself, its investors, and everyone else, Amazon (AMZN) should kill off its Kindle.

There was a point when pushing its own device helped jump-start a relatively nascent form of publishing and drove others, like Sony and Barnes & Noble to either improve or introduce their own units. And it’s easy to understand how Amazon wanted a vibrant e-book market: better potential pricing because of no printing, virtually zero inventory costs, limitless availability, and instant gratification for customers.

The seeming potential has become obvious to almost everyone in the industry (or trying to get into it), as recent announcements have shown:

  • Magazine publisher Hearst is backing the Skiff, with high resolution and the ability for full-motion video.
     
  • Notion Ink announced the yet-to-ship Adam.
     
  • Plastic Logic finally showed its lightweight Que after over a year of promising to.
     
  • Borders Book Group (BGP) and Spring Design have a deal to sell the latter’s Alex reader, which has dual screens (one to show Internet links) and runs Android.
     
  • Book distributor Baker & Taylor, working with K-NFB Reading Technology, announced rich media reader software called Blio, which hopefully will be successful or likely attain the moniker Blooey.

It’s a pretty full slate that faces twin pressures.


Read the rest of the article on bnet.

Tip or Treat for Authors and Indie Publishers: How to Create a "Kindle for the Web" Sample of Your Kindle Book on Any Blog or Website

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Here’s a great tool to help any indie author or publisher connect with readers by sharing free samples of their work.  All you need is a website or a blog, a Kindle edition of your book, and the patience to follow some very basic instructions.

What’s it all about? Earlier this Fall Amazon launched the beta version of "Kindle for the Web," a new feature that should be a tremendous benefit for indie authors and publishers in their efforts to introduce ebook readers to their books, but unfortunately the company has been rather coy when it comes to sharing information to help embed "Kindle for the Web" samples on author and publisher websites and blogs. In fact, the specifics of the way the company has rolled out "Kindle for the Web" have led many authors to a mistaken conclusion that their books are somehow not eligible for the program.

Au contraire.

The beta "Kindle for the Web" program works for just about any book in the U.S. Kindle Store, except for free public domain books, based on my entirely anecdotal and unscientific research. 

So let’s see if we can use this post to help open an important door for our readers and for anyone else with whom you would like to share this information. (We have to begin by sending you to another web page to copy the "script" for this tool, because if we simply pasted the script here you would see the tool rather than the script).

Here are the steps:

  1. Go to this web page — HTML SCRIPT TO EMBED "KINDLE FOR THE WEB" SAMPLE  ON YOUR BLOG OR WEBSITE — and copy the HTML script from that page into a blog post or onto your website. (Be sure set your blog post or other environment to "Edit HTML" rather than "Compose" mode before you paste the script.
     
  2. Select the Kindle edition for which you would like to provide a free sample, and isolate and copy its 10-digit ASIN (this stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, and you can think of it as Amazon’s version of an ISBN) to replace the ASIN in your script.
     
  3. Add your own material or copy before and/or after the script to make the most of the sample feature.

 :

Good luck! And please feel free to share your comments or email them to hppress@gmail.com. Naturally, as with anything else, getting this feature to work on your blog or website is only half the battle. The other half, or more, is attracting readers to see the feature on your blog or website.

Here’s an unadorned example of how the "Kindle for the Web" Sample script looks in a blog post:

 

 

Note: You may substitute the 10-digit ASIN of your choosing within the single quotes for “asin:” and you may also experiment with and change the values for width and height to make “Kindle for the Web” reader fit your blog. Of course, we hope you will keep the ‘ebest’ value for “assoctag:” which supports the Kindle Nation Daily and indieKindle blogs.

 

This is a reprint from Stephen Windwalker’s indieKindle blog.

Crime and Travel Writer

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Hi everyone

Just found this wonderful site as I’ve been trawling for information to help me when I publish my first crime novel early next year. I’ve already done an ebook (and now also a Kindle and Amazon POD book) guide to hotels along the Pacific Coast Highway, which I sell through my website, Pacific Coast Highway Travel. That proved to be fairly straightforward and satisfying, and it sells steadily, so I want to expand what I do, self-publish more travel guides, some of my travel pieces as a collection, re-publish an erotic novel I wrote years ago that’s been long out-of-print, and anything else I can find the time to do inbetween the still-regular paid travel writing gigs (aka the day job)

Mike

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Copyedit offered in benefit auction for writer

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If you’re ready to self-publish but need a final copyedit first, please check out the benefit auction on behalf of Bridget Zinn. Bridget is a Young Adult author and librarian who’s battling Stage 4 colon cancer, and all the auction proceeds go toward her medical expenses that aren’t covered by insurance.

I’m a freelance editor in California who has worked with dozens of self-published authors. I’m donating a full copyedit of a manuscript up to 100,000 words. This would normally cost hundreds of dollars, but you may be able to get a great deal by bidding on the auction. The auction website is www.ly.bridgetauction. Do a search for "manuscript copyedit" if you’re interested. For more about me and my services, please visit my website at www.secondsetofeyes.com, and do feel free to email me if you have any questions before bidding.

The auction lasts until December 4th. If you still need help with macro issues in a developmental edit (voice, plot, pacing, characterization, dialogue, etc.) you can check out other items up for bid–there are many manuscript critiques and evaluations donated by professionals. You can also bid on signed books and other items in the auction, all for a great cause to help a fellow writer.

How Many Of The Top 100 Have You Read?

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There’s this meme going around Facebook at the moment, so I thought I’d drag it out of the social network and onto my blog. It’s pretty flawed, as these things always are, but interesting nonetheless. (Although I am confused by 14 and 98 – bit of a cock up there). Anyway, it goes like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your [Facebook] NOTES. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! [Publetariat Editor’s Note: you can also use the comment area below to list only those you’ve read from the list.]

So yeah, the usual chain letter nature of these things applies here. I’ll bold and italicise as instructed. If you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged.

1) Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Does And Zombies count?)

2) The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3) Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4) Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6) The Bible

7) Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 ) Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9) His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11) Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12) Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13) Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 ) Complete Works of Shakespeare – This could be a bold one, but I’m not sure I’ve read everything.

15) Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – not sure if I finished it ornot, was quite young

16) The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17) Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18) Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19) The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20) Middlemarch – George Eliot

21) Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22) The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23) Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24) War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26) Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27) Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28) Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29) Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30) The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31) Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32) David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33) Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – I don’t think I’ve read all seven, or whatever it is.

34) Emma – Jane Austen

35) Persuasion – Jane Austen

36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia? It’s the 14/98 situation all over again. This really isn’t a very well thought out list…

37) The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere

39) Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40) Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41) Animal Farm – George Orwell

42) The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43) One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45) The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46) Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47) Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48) The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

49) Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50) Atonement – Ian McEwan

51) Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52) Dune – Frank Herbert

53) Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54) Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55) A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56) The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57) A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58) Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60) Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61) Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63) The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64) The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65) Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66) On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67) Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68) Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70) Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Yep, I’m one of those people that’s actually read this whole book. I now know far too much about whales.

71) Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72) Dracula – Bram Stoker

73) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74) Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75) Ulysses – James Joyce

76) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77) Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78) Germinal – Emile Zola

79) Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackera

80) Possession – AS Byatt

81) A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82) Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83) The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85) Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86) A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87) Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I’ve read a lot of Sherlock Holmes, so I assume this is one of them. Is this an omnibus edition or something?

90) The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91) Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92) The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93) The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94) Watership Down – Richard Adams

95) A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96) A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97) The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98) Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100) Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

That’s not a bad result, I suppose. Certainly more than six. But I do question the list. Including “complete works” or series, then adding another item which is a book from that series is a bit redundant and shows quite a lack of thought and planning in the list. But there you go. The list did at least make me notice a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to read but still haven’t, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

Tag!

EDIT: Thanks to Trudi Canavan in the comments for pointing out that the list from Facebook is not, in fact, the same as the original list from the BBC, which you can read here. Which is also out of date, having been last updated in August 2004. Ah, the internet is a minefield of “almost”.

 

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Five Good Reasons To Go POD

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This post, by Kelly James-Enger, originally appeared on her Dollars and Deadlines blog on 11/15/10.

Since I segued into writing books (my first, Ready, Aim, Specialize was published in 2003), I’ve been a traditional girl. Meaning, I’ve only worked with traditional publishers (think Random House) which pay an advance against royalties to acquire the rights to publish a book. To my mind, no money up front=no deal.

Of course I’d heard of POD, or print-on-demand, publishing but knew little about it. It sounded like the “lesser-than” option to me. I’d seen a lot of POD (often called self-published) books that frankly looked terrible. I didn’t like the idea of being wholly responsible for selling a book (even though that’s the case for pretty much any midlist author today). And I couldn’t justify devoting my limited, precious work time to a book that I would have to pay to get in print (as opposed to being paid by a publisher to get it in print). Not for me, I thought.

Well, I was wrong. This year, I published my first POD book, Goodbye Byline, Hello Big Bucks: The Writer’s Guide to Making Money Ghostwriting and Coauthoring Books. But this wasn’t a random act. Rather, it was a calculated decision which included weeks of research and thought to ensure that POD was the right choice. I had five compelling reasons to make the leap:

1. There was no competition for my book. When I looked for books on ghostwriting, there were only a couple—and they weren’t particularly helpful. The authors claimed to be making good money ghostwriting, but didn’t say how much. I hate that. I want specifics! I want details! The authors told you to make sure you had a written contract, but didn’t give any examples. They didn’t discuss how to negotiate fees, how to successfully market yourself to different kinds of clients, or how to address common problems that arise. I knew my book would include all that, and be the only one that gave readers everything they needed to know to break into this lucrative field.

2. The book fit into my platform. While I cover health, fitness, nutrition and wellness, I also have developed a "successful-freelancing-expert" platform over the past 14 years. I’m a contributing editor at The Writer magazine. I’ve written more than 80 features and columns about writing for markets ranging from Writer’s Digest to Writing for Dollars and published two books on successful freelancing. Six-Figure Freelancing continues to sell well, even on a crowded bookshelf. (Seems like every writer wants to author a book about writing and I’m competing against names like Stephen King and Anne Lamott, so this is significant.)
 

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more reasons to go POD, on Dollars and Deadlines.

Suburban Noir Fiction

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Hi Everyone,

I work in high tech marketing, but started seriously writing fiction about ten years ago.

My short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen Mystery magazines. This summer I made the decision to go Indie and will be release my first novel, The Demise of the Soccer Moms in January 2011.

Since my fiction doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre, I’ve adopted the term Suburban Noir.

I’m looking forward to meeting other Indie Authors at Publetariat.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Publetariat staff will be off duty from now through Sunday, 11/28 in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. Members can still post to their blogs and use the Publetariat Forum, but no new content will be posted to the site during this time and emails won’t be answered until Monday, 11/29. No need to click through – this is the end of the post.

How To Write A Back Blurb For Your Book

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You pick up a book because the cover or title looks interesting. The next thing you do is read the back blurb, or if you are online, you read the first excerpt which is usually the same thing.

At basics, the back blurb is a sales pitch. It has to be almost an exaggeration of your story that entices the reader to buy, or at least download a sample to their Kindle or iPad.

How do you write good back blurb?

This is a list of what featured most often from a number of bestselling thrillers reviewed as research from my bookshelf. The principles hold true for any genre although the details change for each.

  • A hint of the plot. “Secret experiment. Tiny island. Big mistake.” (Scott Sigler, Ancestor); “must fight their way past traps, labyrinths and a host of deadly enemies” (Matthew Reilly. Six Sacred Stones);
  • Use of words that evoke images and resonate with readers of the genre. Examples, “ancient monastery” (Raymond Khoury, The Sign), “hidden esoteric wisdom, Masonic secrets” (Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol), “the secret behind Noah’s Ark” (Boyd Morrison, The Ark), “Druidic pagan cross” (James Rollins, The Doomsday Key); “A buried Egyptian temple. A secret kept for 6000 years. A race for life worth killing for.” (Andy McDermott, The Pyramid of Doom)
  • Main characters are named and characterized. “TV news reporter Gracie Logan. Matt Sherwood, reformed car thief” (The Sign); “Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon: (Lost Symbol); “Trapped inside a paralyzed body, Rhyme’s brilliant mind is channeled through his partner, policewoman Amelia Sachs” (Jeffrey Deaver, The Twelfth Card); “Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force” (James Rollins, Doomsday Key)
  • Idea of setting. Washington DC, Rotunda (Dan Brown, Lost Symbol); “from the Roman Coliseum to the icy peaks of Norway, from the ruins of medieval abbeys to the lost tombs of Celtic kings” (James Rollins, Doomsday Key)
  • A question or a hint of mystery that draws the reader in to be solved or answered. “Is the sign real? Is God talking to us? Or is something more sinister going on…” (Raymond Khoury, The Sign)
  • Hyperbole. “stunning controversy that’s spinning out of control” (Raymond Khoury, The Sign); “..never before seen revelations seem to be leading him to a single impossible and inconceivable truth” (Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol); “The mission is incredible. The consequences of failure are unimaginable. The ending is unthinkable.” (Matthew Reilly. Six Sacred Stones)
  • Quotes about the book or previous books by the author. “Part Stephen King, part Chuck Palahniuk…a pulpy masterpiece of action, terror and suspense” (James Rollins on Scott Sigler’s Infected)
  • How long. Most seem to be 100-150 words long as the blurb text itself, not including about the author if included. That is also a nicely spaced blurb, not a squashed one.
  • About the author. This isn’t done often for the blockbuster novels, but James Rollins does it well with a rugged photo and a description that includes “An avid spelunker and certified scuba enthusiast, he can often be found underground or underwater.” Now that’s a thriller writer!

Here is my proposed blurb for ‘Pentecost’

A power kept secret for 2000 years.

A brotherhood broken by murder.

A woman who stands to lose everything.

When Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, the apostles took stone from his tomb as a symbol of their brotherhood. At Pentecost, the fire of the Holy Spirit empowered the stones and the Apostles performed miracles in God’s name throughout the Empire. Forged in the fire and blood of the Christian martyrs, the Pentecost stones were handed down through generations of Keepers who kept their power and locations secret.

Until now.

The Keepers are being murdered, the stones stolen by those who would use them for evil in a world transformed by religious fundamentalism. Oxford University psychologist Morgan Stone is forced into the search when her sister and niece are held hostage. She is helped by Jake Timber from the mysterious ARKANE, a British government agency specializing in paranormal and religious experience.

From ancient Christian sites in Spain, Italy and Israel to the far reaches of Iran and Tunisia, Morgan and Jake must track down the stones through the myths of the early church in a race against time before a new Pentecost is summoned, this time powered by the fire of evil.

******

You can now get free chapters of Pentecost on the Facebook page by clicking here.

********

What do you think? Do you have any tips for improving the ‘Pentecost’ blurb? Or any tips for writing blurb in general?

Photos done in Photofunia.com.

 

This is a reprint from Joanna Penn‘s The Creative Penn.

Cheap Books Or Surviving Business?

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I recently posted about how Aussies can get great prices on books right now because the Aussie dollar and the US dollar are at around 1:1 for the first time. Chuck McKenzie, recently wrote about how cheap online stores are a real threat to bookshops. He cited my post in his own. Chuck’s a good friend of mine, a writer and makes his career as a bookseller, so there’s a good case to be made from his perspective and I certainly don’t take any offence that he would use my post to help back up his own position. He makes many good points that are worth considering.

Chuck’s points about the comparisons between online bookstores and the paralell importation issues are valid. Follow the links in Chuck’s post to learn more. Chuck says:

I’m not pissed off that people are buying online – I’m pissed off at the lack of balance, in that so many people – and, it must be said, so many of the same people who vigorously defended the rights of authors and publishers during the PI debacle – are now singing the praises of the online booksellers without apparently taking stock of what effect this shift in consumer behaviour will mean for traditional booksellers.

I’m rather torn on this subject. I want there to be traditional booksellers. I love bookshsops. I love the people that run bookshops. I’ve always dreamed of owning a bookshop, though I know it’s a pipe dream. But I also love cheap books, because that means I can afford to buy more. I love shopping online because I live in the country and the internet is like a massive mall right on my desk. I’m also a big fan of ebooks, Print-On-Demand as an alternate publishing model and so on. The face of publishing and book selling is changing. We’re moving into the future every day.

The problem is that these things are market driven. While I would love to support Australian stores by buying from them, if I can get two books for the price of one by going online, I probably will. I guess bookshops need to rise to the challenge and offer something the online stores can’t. If they can’t compete with pricing, they need something else to keep them viable. What that something else might be is anyone’s guess. But market forces will ensure that bookshops survive or die based on the services they offer. It would be great if it were different, but we can’t hold back progress, even if it kills things. Which is regularly does.

In my own case, my novels are published in the US. There’s no domestic Australian distribution. So the only way to get them is online. I have some copies here and am always happy to send out a signed copy to anyone that buys one, but it’ll cost them more than if they bought it from Amazon or Book Depository. Maybe having a signed copy is enough to warrant the extra expense on their part. I also sell them at cons and have books in a variety of bookstores that are generous enough to stock them for me. Chuck’s store is one of those and I’m extremely grateful to Chuck for helping me to shift books by making them available on Australian shelves.

You may remember the instore signing I did recently. That was at Chuck’s shop and it was excellent fun, we all sold some books and had a great time. I don’t want to see things like that stop. I don’t want Chuck’s career to get eaten by progress.

Perhaps it’s worth all of us stopping periodically to check before we buy a book. Maybe we should think about local business over price and try to help bookstores survive. But it’s not really our job to do that. We’re the consumers and we’ll be guided by the market and the prices. As a writer, I want as many bookstores as possible, because that should mean more sales for me. I can’t see bookstores ever disappearing completely. But while we wait for the shops to come up with ways to keep themselves going, maybe we should do all within our means to support them in the meantime.

 

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

What Publishers Ask

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We’re happy to present a third post from author and Publetariat member L.J. Sellers. While this article specifically addresses what mainstream publishers look for when acquiring new manuscripts, it provides a helpful checklist for evaluating work to be self-published, as well.

I evaluate fiction manuscripts for a publisher, using a standard form crafted by the publishing house. The form contains a list questions, grouped by subject: premise, plot, POV, character, dialogue, and setting. I’m sharing some of the questions so you can see specifically how a publisher might evaluate your manuscript.

 
Opening:
Does the first page grab the reader’s attention?
Does the first chapter set up the basis for the rest of the story?
 
Premise and Tone:
Is the basic premise or theme interesting? Believable? Unique?
Is the focus of the work revealed early in the novel?
Is the basic premise of the novel well executed?
 
Point of View:
Is the point of view consistent throughout?
Are shifts in point of view, if any, necessary and simple to follow?
Is the point of view used appropriately to convey the thoughts or emotions of various characters?
 
Structure, Plot, and Pace:
Is there a planned series of carefully selected interrelated incidents?
Are there situations that heighten the conflict?
Does the story have a clear conclusion or satisfactory ending appropriate to the genre?
Do the plot and structure sufficiently hold the reader’s interest throughout?
 
Setting:
Is the setting described appropriately without slowing the pace of the work?
Does the novel provide an appropriate sense of place?
 
Characterization:
Does the author provide a clear visual image of the characters?
Does the behavior of all characters seem realistic?
Are the characters presented with realistic challenges and life situations?
Do you feel an emotional connection to any of the characters?
Are characters introduced effectively and for a specific purpose?
 
Dialogue:
Does the dialogue reveal the character’s background or identifying traits?
Is there a good balance of dialogue and action?
Does the dialogue sound authentic, and is it used effectively throughout?
 
As you can see, publishers have high—and specific—expectations that apply across all fiction genres.
 
 
L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, and Passions of the Dead. All are available as e-books for $2.99 or less.

20 Essential African-American Writers

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This article originally appeared on Mastersdegree.net on 11/22/10.

Though things have steadily improved a bit over the past few decades, the literary canon is still dominated by what’s commonly criticized as "dead white men." Because of this phenomenon, the contributions of female and minority writers, philosophers, scholars and activists fall to the wayside — sometimes completely missing opportunities to pick up prestigious awards. Readers from all backgrounds hoping to diversify their intake of novels, poetry, essays and speeches would do well to start here when looking for African-American perspectives. Far more than 20 fantastic writers exist, of course, but the ones listed here provide an amazing start.

  1. Maya Angelou (1928-): This incredible Renaissance woman served as the American Poet Laureate, won several Grammy Awards, served the Civil Rights cause under the venerable Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taught numerous classes and enjoyed a respectable performing arts career — all while never losing sight of her elegant poetry and prose. Her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings remains one of the most essential and inspiring examples of the genre, often finding its way onto syllabi across the nation. Like every other entry on this list, she’s more than an essential African-American writer — she’s an essential component of the literary canon, period.

  2. James Baldwin (1924-1987): Writer, activist and expatriate James Baldwin fearlessly tackled challenging, controversial sexual and racial subject matter at a time when hate crimes and abuse against the African-Americans and members of the LGBTQIA community ran riot. The impact of religion, for better or for worse, amongst the two marginalized minorities comprises one of his major themes. Go Tell it on the Mountain, Baldwin’s sublime debut novel, pulled from his own life experiences and opened readers up to the realities those forced to the fringes of society must face on a daily basis — and how they find the strength to continue in spite of adversity.

  3. Sterling Allen Brown (1901-1989): Folklore, jazz and Southern African-American culture greatly inspired the highly influential academic and poet. In 1984, Sterling Allen Brown received the distinguished position of Poet Laureate of the District of Colombia for his considerable contributions to education, literature and literary criticism — not to mention his mentorship of such notable figures as Toni Morrison, Ossie Davis, Stokely Carmichael and many more. Along with Langston Hughes and many others during the "Harlem Renaissance" (a term Brown considered a mere media label), he showed the world why poetry written in the African-American vernacular could be just as beautiful, effective as anything else written in any other language.

  4. William Demby (1922-): In 2006, received a Lifetime Achievement recognition from the Saturday Review‘s Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. He has only written four novels to date, with 1950s reflection on West Virginian race relations Beetlecreek garnering the most attention. These days, he works as a contributing editor for the nonprofit, bimonthly literary journal American Book Review after having retired from academia in 1989.

  5. Frederick Douglass (1817-1895): Today, schoolchildren across America remember Frederick Douglass as one of the most inspiring voices in the pre-Civil War Abolitionist movement. Because of his autobiographies and essays — most famously, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a Slave – readers fully understood the mortal and dehumanizing dangers found on slave plantations and farms. Following emancipation, Douglass continued working as a political activist and lecturer, traveling all over the world to discuss issues of slavery and equal rights.

  6. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906): Even those unfamiliar with the amazing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writings still know of them tangentially — "I know why the caged bird sings," the inspiration for Maya Angelou’s autobiography, comes from his poem "Sympathy." Way before that, though, he earned a reputation as the first African-American poet to gain national renown, though his oeuvre stretched into novels, plays, librettos and more as well. Most literary critics and historians accept that the sublime 1896 piece "Ode to Ethiopia" the defining work that launched him to national acclaim, paving the way for later writers from a number of different marginalized communities to shine through.

  7. Ralph Ellison (1914-1994): To this day, Invisible Man remains one of the most intense portraits of a marginalized community (American or not) ever printed. Writer, literary critic and academic Ralph Ellison bottled up the anger and frustration of African-Americans — specifically men — shoved to the fringes of society for no reason other than skin color, paying close attention to how they channeled such volatile emotions. Even beyond his magnum opus, he made a name for himself as an insightful scholar with a keen eye for analyzing and understanding all forms of literature, and he published numerous articles fans should definitely check out.

  8. bell hooks (1952-): Gloria Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, stands at the forefront of postmodern feminism. Thanks to her impressive activism work meaning to break down racial, gender and sexual barriers, she published some of the most essential works on the subjects — including the incredibly intelligent and insightful Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Today, she continues to lecture, publish and teach classes that carry on her philosophies pushing towards a more equitable, harmonious society.

  9. Langston Hughes (1902-1967): Regardless of whether or not one considers the Harlem Renaissance a broad media label or a legitimate literary movement (or somewhere in between), few argue that Langston Hughes emerged as one of the most essential American writers of the period. He worked in a wide range of styles, from plays to novels to essays to songs, but today’s audiences seem to know him from his poetry more than anything else. Though the short story collection The Ways of White Folks still garners plenty of attention for its sarcastic take on race relations in the early decades of the 20th Century.

  10. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): Because Zora Neale Huston intently studied anthropology and folklore, her fictional characters crackle with nuance that becomes more apparent in subsequent readings. Her oeuvre stretches across four books, with Their Eyes Were Watching God easily the most recognized, and over 50 plays, short stories and essays — all of them considered some of the finest examples of Harlem Renaissance literature (not to mention American in general!). Interestingly enough, her conservative leanings placed her at odds with her more liberal contemporaries from the movement, most especially the heavily influential Langston Hughes.

 

Read the rest of the article, featuring 10 more essential African-American writers, on Mastersdegree.net.

Smaller Presses, Bigger Authors

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This article, by Rachel Deahl, originally appeared on Publisher’s Weekly on 11/8/10.

The midlist is dying. That sentiment has been a mantra in publishing circles for years as agents, authors, and editors have decried that corporate publishing will no longer support the kind of author that was once an industry staple—the moderate success who was a consistent seller, if not a bestseller. With the "big six" demanding bigger sales numbers from all their authors, indie presses, which have long been the province of riskier, harder-to-market literary fiction, are finding that more commercial writers are showing up at their doors, as well as writers with serious accolades and lengthier track records.

One shift is that the definition of  the midlist author has changed. A number of agents and publishers interviewed said when editors at the big houses look at the sales performance of an author’s last book in considering acquiring that author’s new book, the number they need to see is bigger than it used to be. While it’s been rumored that a publisher at one of the major houses told his staff they couldn’t acquire authors whose last book sold fewer than 50,000 copies, most sources said they thought the so-called "magic number" was closer to 25,000 or 30,000. One agent, noting that there’s far more variation at the paperback imprints of the big six, said most hardcover publishers today "would settle for 20,000."

Munro Magruder, publisher of New World Library, believes presses like his have become the beneficiary of this trend. In the past few years, Magruder said he’s seen an influx of midlist authors who had spent years at the big houses. He cited two books NWL published in October—Alice Walker’s poetry collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing and Michael Krasny’s Spiritual Envy—as books he thought he might not have gotten years back. (Walker wrote the megaseller The Color Purple, and Krasny is the host of KQED’s Forum out of San Francisco.) NWL considers both books to have been successes—Krasny’s title has already sold out its first printing of 8,500 copies, and Walker’s collection sold out its 7,500-copy first run.

While authors often find that they and their books are paid more attention when they move from big house to indie press, there is the sting of losing the bigger advance. Most of the smaller publishers PW spoke to cited $5,000 as a high advance, and others acknowledged paying as little as $1,500, and that can be a tough pill for agents, and authors, to swallow.

Johnny Temple, at Akashic Books, said it’s unfortunate that the big houses can’t afford to publish books on a smaller scale, but it’s a reality of today’s industry and one that not all agents and authors have fully accepted: "These big companies, every book they do they’re trying to knock it out of the park, and they don’t have the flexibility to publish books at different levels. The flip side, though, is authors and agents like to have big advances and don’t like to think about what the fiscal reality of that is." Since the big publishers were overpaying for books for years, Temple added, he thinks "some agents and authors got a little soft, and too comfy, being overpaid."

 

Read the rest of the article on Publisher’s Weekly.

Strengthen Your Writing With Stories

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As a professional storyteller with a family oral tradition background, stories come to me naturally. I use stories to beef up both my nonfiction and my fiction writing. They are used differently in each type of writing, so I will explain.

Nonfiction

Back in the 1990s when I was cranking out self-defense and personal security books, I used the power of story a lot. I always introduced and explained my various concepts. Then, I would use a short story of a paragraph or so long as a way to illustrate the concept with an everyday, true-life example. My book Surviving Hostage Situations is filled with true stories of people who survived hostage situations. Each mini-story shows how the concept I was teaching worked in each respective case.

This can work for all kinds of nonfiction. For instance, a business how-to book can include case studies that illustrate the author’s intent. Biographies are built on stories and vignettes. Stories make a book more human, more believable.

Fiction

Now I know some of you are saying that fiction is nothing but a story. That’s true; however, it can be illustrated with true or imaginary tales that help shape the book. Let me explain by using a true story. My 6th mystery needs to start with a bang of a hook to drag readers into wanting to read the rest of the book. My hook will based on a true story that happened to me back in the spring of 1986.

I was hired by Kansas City Kansas Community College to teach a class in Business Law to prisoners incarcerated in the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. It was an evening class. One night, a bunch of correction officers came running into the classroom and shouted out instructions, “Prisoners on your feet! Line up in the hallway. Are you OK, Mr. Spear?”

“Yeah, but what do you guys know that I don’t?”

“We found a blood trail out in the hallway and thought it might be your’s.”

Some of the officers escorted the prisoners back to their cells while others tracked down the blood trail. They found a prisoner with a badly gashed hand hiding in a stairwell. He claimed he’d stumbled and cut it on the steps. In actuality, he’d survived an attack from another prisoner with a shank, a homemade knife.

Needless to say, class was over for that evening. While I waited on an officer to escort me out to the front entrance, the Lieutenant of the guard shift told me shanking war stories.

OK, so that’s the story. Now, let me explain how I will use it. The hook will begin with a concerned prisoner who has just learned through the prison rumor mill that the head of the Mexican drug gang in the prison has put out a contract on him for having sold some dope without the drug lord’s permission. He suddenly see’s the drug lord’s enforcer working his way toward him through a crowd of prisoners. The victim turns away and runs toward the education center with his executioner close behind and…well you can see where all that’s going, except this prisoner won’t survive the fifty odd stab wounds he receives. I will combine my incident with some of the stories the guard Lieutenant told me to give realistic descriptions of the hook incident.

This is why I’m always on the lookout for interesting stories in the media, on the internet, and wherever else I hear them. Combining real-life stories with your fiction gives it extra oomph. This is why some writers spend time around folks who do in real life what the writers’ characters do in their books. It really adds a sense of authenticity. Never forget the power of story. This doesn’t mean one should overwhelm the reader with backstory, but it helps shape the presentation of plot and action.

 

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

What Publishers Ask

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I evaluate fiction manuscripts for a publisher, using a standard form crafted by the publishing house. The form contains a list questions, grouped by subject: premise, plot, POV, character, dialogue, and setting. I’m sharing some of the questions so you can see specifically how a publisher might evaluate your manuscript.

 

Opening:

Does the first page grab the reader’s attention?

Does the first chapter set up the basis for the rest of the story?

 

Premise and Tone:

Is the basic premise or theme interesting? Believable? Unique?

Is the focus of the work revealed early in the novel?

Is the basic premise of the novel well executed?

 

Point of View:

Is the point of view consistent throughout?

Are shifts in point of view, if any, necessary and simple to follow?

Is the point of view used appropriately to convey the thoughts or emotions of various characters?

 

Structure, Plot, and Pace:

Is there a planned series of carefully selected interrelated incidents?

Are there situations that heighten the conflict?

Does the story have a clear conclusion or satisfactory ending appropriate to the genre?

Do the plot and structure sufficiently hold the reader’s interest throughout?

 

Setting:

Is the setting described appropriately without slowing the pace of the work?

Does the novel provide an appropriate sense of place?

 

Characterization:

Does the author provide a clear visual image of the characters?

Does the behavior of all characters seem realistic?

Are the characters presented with realistic challenges and life situations?

Do you feel an emotional connection to any of the characters?

Are characters introduced effectively and for a specific purpose?

 

Dialogue:

Does the dialogue reveal the character’s background or identifying traits?

Is there a good balance of dialogue and action?

Does the dialogue sound authentic, and is it used effectively throughout?

 

As you can see, publishers have high—and specific—expectations that apply across all fiction genres.

 

L.J. Sellers is the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries: The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, Thrilled to Death, and Passions of the Dead. All are available as e-books for $2.99 or less.