Think

Opinion pieces offering commentary on various aspects of book culture, publishing and self-publishing.

Jane Austen Read Her Reviews… and Kept Notes on Them

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This post by Sal Robinson originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 5/22/14.

Some authors refuse to read their reviews. And then there’s Jane Austen. Who not only, it turns out, listened to what her friends and acquaintances had to say about her books, both positive and negative, but also took notes on it.

Austen’s notes are part of a cache of 1,200 documents that the British Library have drawn out of their Victorian and Romantic collections and are now highlighting on their website with all kinds of supplementary bells and whistles—contextualizing essays, documentary films, and images of primary sources ranging from manuscripts to illustrations to advertisements, broadsides, and the occasional dancing manual.

Austen appears to have compiled the reactions of her readers from letters, hearsay, and direct conversations and recorded them on a set of closely written pages around 1815, before her death at the age of 41, two years later.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

12 Most Fierce Ways to Protect Your Blogging Time

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This post by Linda Dessau originally appeared on 12Most on 5/20/14.

Blogging can easily fall off your to-do list when you’re faced with other pressing tasks in your business and life. Yet blogging only works if you do it consistently and you do it well.

Since achieving both those things requires time you don’t think you have, here are 12 ways to set and protect that time.

 

1. Put it first
While it seems counterintuitive, try working on your blogging tasks before client tasks or business development. This may be the only way to keep blogging from getting pushed behind your other priorities. Then, let the accomplishment of making progress on your blog fuel your confidence (and grow your business!) all day long.

 

2. Schedule it as an appointment
Simply setting the intention to blog will not make it happen. You need to clarify when you will blog, and get it onto your calendar. Treat this the same as you would any other important commitment.

 

3. Say no to yourself
If you feel so overloaded with tasks that you can’t imagine taking even 20 minutes at the start of each work day, there is too much on your plate and something has to give. This is a life issue, not a blogging issue, and the rest of your life will be ever so grateful to your blog if [you] stop taking on too much — and start delegating some of what’s already there.

 

Click here to read the full post on 12Most.

 

10 Things You Need To Know About Publishing FanFic on Amazon

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This post by Tara Maya originally appeared on her Tara Maya’s Tales site on 6/27/13.

Amazon is rocking the publishing world once again with a brand new kind of publishing: legal fan fic. Okay, there have been licensed novels before… Star Trek novels, Star Wars novels, movie novelizations… but this is far more accessible.

It’s called Kindle Worlds. Right now, there are only about twelve Worlds available to write in. Some biggies, like Harry Potter and Twilight, are not on the list. A few are television worlds, a few are author’s own worlds (such as Wool).

However, before you break out dancing and toss your Snape and Legolas slash romance/adventure into the ring, there are a few things you need to know about publishing fan fiction with Amazon.

 

1. This is not self-publishing, as with KDP.

Amazon’s self-publishing platform, KDP, allows authors to keep all rights to their own works. Amazon takes a cut of the royalties as a distributor, but Amazon is not the publisher. With Kindle Worlds, “All works accepted for Kindle Worlds will be published by Amazon Publishing.”

That said, this doesn’t seem intended to be as exclusive as the Singles program. Amazon wants your content, as long as it’s not something they will be sued over.

 

2. The steps seem pretty easy.

 

Click here to read the full post on Tara Maya’s Tales.

 

Neal Pollack on Rebounding From Massive Hype and Six-Figure Deals to Online Publishing

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This post by Nathan Rabin originally appeared on The A/V Club on 3/14/13.

In Money Matters, creative people discuss what they’re not supposed to: the intersection of entertainment and commerce, as well as moments in their lives and careers when they bottomed out financially and/or professionally. 

The artist: Neal Pollack appeared in the national consciousness as part of the talented group of writers and editors that gravitated to McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’ publishing empire. In 2000, The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature—a collection of satirical pieces centering on the fictional “Neal Pollack” persona, a larger-than-life spoof of macho world-beaters like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer—became the first book published by McSweeney’s publishing arm. (The book was later re-published by HarperCollins.) A satirical rock novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, followed in 2003, and was followed by 2007’s Alternadad, a memoir about his experiences raising his son. Alternadad generated tons of publicity and human-interest stories about hipster parenting, in addition to generating interest from the television and film industries. But the book’s sales failed to match its buzz, and television and film adaptations didn’t pan out.

Pollack published a yoga memoir, Stretch, in 2010, but over the past two years he has devoted much of his time and energy to writing mysteries for new publishing paradigms. In March of 2011, Pollack self-published the Kindle release JewBall, a period basketball mystery that attracted the attention of Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer mystery imprint, which reprinted it as a download and a paperback. Pollack followed it up with another mystery for Thomas & Mercer, in this case a yoga-themed book called Downward-Facing Death that Amazon released in serialized installments; it’s now available in its entirety as both a Kindle release and a paperback. Sequels to both mysteries are in the works.

The A.V. Club: What was your relationship to money as a child? 

Neal Pollack: When I was 7 years old, we moved to Paradise Valley, Arizona, which is a very wealthy suburb of Phoenix. In fact, I’d say it’s a very wealthy suburb of Scottsdale. And this wasn’t the Paradise Valley that was described in—this is a very dated movie reference—Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater movie. This was the town of Paradise Valley. In the movie it was called Paradise Hill. The town of Paradise Valley that attracted such exclusive real estate that there’s not commercial real estate in it to this day. It’s best known as where Camel Back Mountain is, and there may be a couple of boutiques on one of the streets and then there’s the Barry Goldwater Memorial. So that’s where I grew up. My father was a hotel executive and, at the time we moved there, there were no paved roads in the section where we lived. Every house had to have acres of desert land, and that’s still the case. Not our immediate next-door neighbors, but the family down the dirt road were the heirs to the Campbell’s Soup fortune. They were billionaires, multi-billionaires. My family wasn’t anything like that, but my dad had a very good corporate executive job.

Then, in 1979, he lost that job. We suddenly went very quickly from being upper-middle class to really struggling financially. And that had a big impact on me, because I watched my parents really struggle with having to pay bills and buy groceries and find work.

 

Click here to read the full post on The A/V Club.

 

Series v. Serial and Why I’m Weary

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This post by Lisa Torcasso Downing originally appeared on her site on 6/25/13.

Over the last few days I consumed David Farland’s engaging Nightingale, a YA tale of the SFF persuasion. When it comes to leisure reading, I’m much more likely to pick up SFF if it’s a YA novel because I like to read what my kids like to read. To be completely forthcoming, I probably wouldn’t have purchased my Kindle copy of Nightingale were it not for the recent Facebook campaign to promote the book. I knew I’d enjoy Dave’s book because he’s a wonderful storyteller, even if weird stuff happens in his books. Like suction cups appearing on the fingtertips of the protagonist. Most of the time, I just can’t make the leap SFF writers hope I can make, but every Farland (or Wolverton) SFF novel that I’ve read has made me a believer. Heck, when I hit the 70% mark in my read-thru of Nightingale, I texted a friend who loves SFF and told her not to miss this one.  I was completely taken in.

And then the ending hit. Or rather, the non-ending. Okay, I admit I didn’t love the wind-up of his historical fiction, In the Company of Angels, but for an entirely different reason. I simply didn’t agree with where he chose to end that one. The “problem” I have with Nightingale’s ending  isn’t so much a problem with the ending as with the trend it successfully follows. The truth is, Dave ended Nightingale with the skill and craftsmanship a great writer should. I just don’t like the trend toward serials that has taken over YA fiction. My complaint, then, is not about Nightingale, which achieves its aims with great success, but with the current love affair YA publishers are having with serial fiction.

 

Click here to read the full post on Lisa Torcasso Downing’s site.

 

Announcement Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption

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This post from the Amazon Books Team was posted on the Amazon site on 5/27/14.

We are currently buying less (print) inventory and “safety stock” on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future. Instead, customers can order new titles when their publication date arrives. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Hachette — availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Hachette to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to the customer promptly. These changes are related to the contract and terms between Hachette and Amazon.

At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette, which is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. Unfortunately, despite much work from both sides, we have been unable to reach mutually-acceptable agreement on terms. Hachette has operated in good faith and we admire the company and its executives. Nevertheless, the two companies have so far failed to find a solution. Even more unfortunate, though we remain hopeful and are working hard to come to a resolution as soon as possible, we are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon.

Negotiating with suppliers for equitable terms and making stocking and assortment decisions based on those terms is one of a bookseller’s, or any retailer’s, most important jobs. Suppliers get to decide the terms under which they are willing to sell to a retailer. It’s reciprocally the right of a retailer to determine whether the terms on offer are acceptable and to stock items accordingly. A retailer can feature a supplier’s items in its advertising and promotional circulars, “stack it high” in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day. When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers in the medium and long term.

A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units. If you order 1,000 items from Amazon, 989 will be unaffected by this interruption. If you do need one of the affected titles quickly, we regret the inconvenience and encourage you to purchase a new or used version from one of our third-party sellers or from one of our competitors.

We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.

This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective.

http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html

Thank you.
 

10 Words That You've Probably Been Misusing

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This post by Tyler Vendetti originally appeared on Hello Giggles on 7/21/13.

There are so many words in the English language that it’s not surprising that the definitions for some of them have gotten mixed up over the years. It’s possible that you’ve gone your entire life without realizing your mistakes. I’m sure people have noticed. One day, you were probably walking down the street, casually chatting with an old friend, and one of these words slipped out of your mouth. Before you can move on to your story about how Mufasa would actually make a very attractive human, your friend stops to correct your error, and suddenly, your whole life starts to feel like one giant lie. How long have you been using that word incorrectly, you wonder? How many angry Facebook rants have you ruined with your improper grammar? While I can’t give you an answer to those questions, I can at least provide you with a list of other tricky words so that you may never have to suffer from this embarrassment ever again:

 

1) Travesty

What you may think it means: a tragedy, an unfortunate event

What it actually means: a mockery; a parody

This one, I’ll admit, is my own personal error. For the longest time, I equated travesty with tragedy, mostly because in passing, they sound like the same word. It’s stupid, I know, but if you knew how many times I confused fetal position with beetle position, you wouldn’t be laughing. It’s a serious problem.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hello Giggles.

 

Series Readers—What They Really Want To See In Our Books

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her blog on 5/21/14.

I’ve just finished the latest Southern quilting mystery—book five in that series, due to release in late 2015.  So that means, right now, I’m no longer under a contract until Penguin decides if they’d like to acquire more books for the series (likely something they would determine after seeing sales figures for book four, coming out in August).

For the first time…ever, really…the only project I have to work on is my self-published Myrtle Clover series. I started book seven at my usual full throttle, and then slowed my writing pace down a bit and decided to take a more thoughtful approach.

I have a completed outline for the book.  The mystery looks pretty sound. Readers told me they especially wanted more humor and the book’s outline has plenty included.

But then I remembered some of the other emails I’ve gotten.  Readers have been writing me and mentioning things they’d like to see in my Myrtle stories. Others wrote that they were “so glad to hear more about____”. I remember reading these emails and being baffled because the elements the readers liked and wanted to hear more about seemed very incidental to the story.

But I know by now that anything readers like, even if it seems incidental to me, is simply a sign that I’m not getting it.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s blog.

 

While You Are Out…

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This post by John E. McIntyre originally appeared on The Baltimore Sun on 5/23/14.

The holiday weekend has started, and many of you are undoubtedly trapped in slow-moving traffic on your way to the beach or the mountains. And because it’s a holiday weekend, those of you who are not trapped on the road won’t be reading anyhow, but enjoying summery drinks on the verandah.

That makes it more the pity that you will be missing these links to some choice pieces of writing about language by my friends and colleagues. Check them out when you get back.

Item: So you think you know something about grammar? Prove it by taking the Stroppy Editor’s grammar quiz.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes links to four more items of interest on the topic of language, on The Baltimore Sun.

 

Amazon vs. Hachette: What It’s About And Why I’m Rooting For Amazon

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This post by Publetariat founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Digital Media Mom site on 5/24/14.

As you may have heard, or read, or discovered while browsing Kindle books on the Amazon site, Amazon is currently in the middle of a battle with “Big 5″ publisher Hachette. The beef is over reseller wholesale contract terms (the publisher’s ‘cut’ on every ebook of theirs sold by Amazon), and Amazon has been using some strongarm tactics to remind Hachette that Amazon doesn’t HAVE to sell Hachette books at all if the parties can’t come to an agreement.

 

First, a little background is needed.

Back when the Kindle was new and ebooks were just starting to become a thing, say 2008 or so, Amazon established wholesale terms with publishers on ebooks based on the “fixed price” (usually known as a “suggested retail price” in other industries, for other products) which was set by the publishers. Amazon could discount the actual sales price of ebooks to whatever they wanted, or even offer them for free, so long as they paid the publisher the wholesale rate that was based on the publisher’s fixed price.

For example, if the publisher’s fixed price was $15 (seriously, that’s the average of the fixed prices the Big 5 publishers were setting; on some ebooks they wanted to go as high as $18) and the publisher’s wholesale cut was 40%, Amazon would have to pay the publisher $5.60 for every copy sold or given away on Amazon. Whether the ebook ultimately sold for $10, $6, or was given away for free, Amazon owed the publisher $5.60 for every copy distributed to Amazon customers. As a result, Amazon was (and still is) actually LOSING money on many ebook sales, but they were willing to take the hit to establish their Kindle line as dominant among ereaders.

 

A couple years down the road, publishers started to get nervous.

In 2010 publishers decided they didn’t want Amazon to have the right to set its own prices on their ebooks anymore, even though Amazon’s retail pricing didn’t affect their wholesale cut AT ALL. They feared that if Amazon were allowed to establish $9.99 in the minds of consumers as a standard price point for frontlist ebooks (new release ebooks the publisher expects to sell well), they would never succeed in rolling out their own, much higher fixed prices. And they were probably right about that, but only because the fixed prices they had in mind for frontlist ebooks were ridiculously high to begin with.

 

Click here to read the full post on Digital Media Mom.

 

Three Reasons Why I Do Not Give a Fig Who Steals My Books

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This post by Patricia V. Davis originally appeared on the Women’s National Book Association San Francisco Chapter site on 3/18/13.

A few years back, I was in the audience listening to a speaker at a prestigious writers’ conference as he warned us about book piracy and how many potential sales authors stood to lose as a result.

“I know for a fact that people are pirating my work and even selling my books illegally online,” he said, clearly not happy about that.

He went on to inform a roomful of mostly new writers that he’d even caught some reviewers ─ legitimate ones ─ selling their review copy of his book on eBay after they’d reviewed it. “When giving out review copies of your books, be sure to write ‘review copy’ in it, to help prevent that from happening,” he cautioned. He continued in the same vein about illegal copies being obtained for his ebooks, as well, and I observed several audience members taking notes diligently on his piracy prevention suggestions.

The problem is, I’d personally never heard of him before that conference, and if you ask me even now, I couldn’t tell you the title of even one of his books.

What does this mean? I’m getting to that.

Let’s take another scenario:  Me, as a teenager at a neighbor’s garage sale. She had a bin of old paperbacks that she was selling at ten cents each. Obviously we’re going way back here, before the internet even existed, so in essence, her reselling of those paperbacks at ten cents each was that era’s equivalent of today’s online book piracy. I bought a paperback that looked intriguing ─ why not, at that price? ─ and took it home to read. I became so enraptured by the story, that I read it all in one sitting, then raided my babysitting money which I’d saved for something else, walked all the way to the local bookstore and bought another of her books at the full paperback retail price that same day. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly bought her titles, and sometimes, if I’m feeling famished for the quality brain candy novels that she writes, and something new she’s written looks particularly appealing, I won’t even wait for the paperback version ─ I’ll spring for the hardback price of 25 dollars plus tax. (Yes, even this day of eReaders and iPads, I still buy hardback books.) So, the novel that I bought “illegally” hooked me into becoming a lifelong fan of this author.

 

Click here to read the full post on the WNBA San Francisco Chapter site.

 

Save Our Stacks

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This post by Rebecca Schuman originally appeared on Slate on 5/12/14.

It’s not about the books. It’s about the books representing the last place on campus where intellectual contemplation thrives.

If a college library moves 170,000 of its books to storage, to make room for sumptuous new administrative offices—which is happening at Maine’s Colby College—does it still count as a library? Or, as an impassioned open letter from concerned faculty attests, is it no longer “a place for reflection and deep thought, research and scholarship,” but rather merely “a waiting room” sans books and a reference librarian, and surrounded by temples to the new gods of the American university?

The Colby administration argues that the renovations are there to help the students, providing them with more study space. The student newspaper is less convinced, headlining an op-ed “Sorry, Your New Library Still Sucks.”

The Colby case is but one example of a widespread move to re-appropriate library space in the age of digitization. From the University of Nebraska to the University of Edinburgh, from the University of Nevada–Las Vegas to Kent State, knowledge repositories the world over may soon have to change their names, because the liber will be increasingly hard to come by. In fact, the only major library to “resist” this trend—the New York Public Library—did so only reluctantly, and out of capitulation to a passionate, organized, grass-roots campaign.

 

Click here to read the full article on Slate.

 

Literature Still Urgently Needs More Non-White, Non-Male Heroes

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This editorial by Monica Byrne originally appeared on The Atlantic on 5/20/14.

If privileged writers keep “writing what they know,” marginalized people groups will continue to feel—and be—marginalized.

One of the most celebrated pieces of advice to writers is “Write what you know.” Unfortunately, it shows.

The demographics of published writers in the West are largely homogeneous, and as a result, our literature is also largely homogeneous. Growing up, for example, my heroes were Atreju, Frodo, and Paul Atreides. All I ever really wanted to do was go on adventures like them. I readily identified with them, and their trials became my scripture: the loss of Artax, the recovery at Lothlórien, the knife fight with Feyd-Rautha.

Despite a liberal upbringing and an education at a women’s college, it didn’t occur to me that my identification with male heroes had damaged me in any way—that is, until I became a writer, and found myself weirdly reluctant to write a woman hero. This wasn’t an accident.

As Vanessa Veselka wrote in The American Reader, there is a profound relative lack of female road narratives in the Western literary tradition. This absence hurt her in much more concrete ways. When recounting her years as a teenage hitchhiker, Veselka writes, “my survival depended on other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me…[but] there was no cultural narrative for [us] beyond rape and death.” Male hitchhikers had Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and dozens of others. Veselka had bodies in dumpsters on the six o’clock news.

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The Atlantic.

 

Don’t Ever Do It For the Money: A Conversation with My Agent

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This interview by Edan Lepucki originally appeared on The Millions on 5/19/14.

Whenever my students ask me about getting a literary agent, I say three things: 1. There are a lot of agents out there. 2. The process can take a long time, so be prepared for rejection and waiting, waiting, waiting. 3. If you’re afraid of your agent, he or she is not the right agent for you. That last piece of advice is borne out of my experience working with Erin Hosier, whom I consider not only my advocate and colleague, but my friend. I’m not afraid to email her for advice and I do not fear her reaction to my work. (Other friends of mine seem cowed by their agents, which saddens me: if your agent can’t root for you, then who in the business can?) Erin is honest and smart and funny, and if I am bugging her too much I expect her to tell me so. When she isn’t agenting at Dunow, Carlson and Lerner, she’s writing. Her memoir, D0n’t Let Me Down, is forthcoming from Atria Books. Also: her lipstick is always impeccable.

She answered the following questions via email within 24-hours. If you want to hear more from Erin — and who won’t after reading this? — she’ll be appearing at WWLA: The Conference on Saturday, June 28, 2014. (And, yes, that’s a shameless plug.)

 

The Millions: How did you become a literary agent?

Erin Hosier: I had been interning at a magazine and found it to be a stressful, low-paying job with a lot of responsibility, but I loved the editorial meetings. I loved talking about ideas and strategizing with smart people. It was thrilling to help put together an issue of a magazine, and see the fruits of our labor on display just three months later. The people there were always bummed out, though. They moved so quickly through an idea when I wanted to immerse myself in one. I happened to read a galley of a book called The Forest For The Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, that made book publishing sound much more my speed. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was introduced to the book’s author, Betsy Lerner, who then hired me to be her assistant when she made the switch from Doubleday editor to literary agent at The Gernert Co. The whole thing happened very quickly, in the time it would have taken for another issue of the magazine to come out. I answered phones and worked really hard for a year before I ever sold a book, but once I showed the aptitude, I was given a lot of support and encouragement to move forward in my career. There was nothing corporate about that agency. I didn’t have to compete with anyone or fill a quota. I’ll always be grateful for that experience, but my publishing soulmate will always be Betsy Lerner, who I’ll follow to the ends of the earth.

 

TM: Can you describe, in 2-3 sentences, why a writer needs an agent?

 

Click here to read the full interview on The Millions.

 

A Life Beyond ‘Do What You Love’

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This editorial by Gordon Marino originally appeared on The New York Times Opinionator on 5/17/14. Authors and writers often struggle with the choice between quitting their day jobs to follow their passion fulltime, and maintaining a toehold on financial stability. This piece speaks to the practical limitations and societal downsides of pursuing one’s passion to the exclusion of all else.

Student advisees often come to my office, rubbing their hands together, furrowing their brows and asking me to walk along with them as they ponder life after graduation. Just the other day, a sophomore made an appointment because he was worrying about whether he should become a doctor or a philosophy professor. A few minutes later, he nervously confessed that he had also thought of giving stand-up comedy a whirl.

As an occupational counselor, my kneejerk reaction has always been, “What are you most passionate about?” Sometimes I‘d even go into a sermonette about how it is important to distinguish between what we think we are supposed to love and what we really love.

But is “do what you love” wisdom or malarkey?

In a much discussed article in Jacobin magazine early this year, the writer Miya Tokumitsu argued that the “do what you love” ethos so ubiquitous in our culture is in fact elitist because it degrades work that is not done from love. It also ignores the idea that work itself possesses an inherent value, and most importantly, severs the traditional connection between work, talent and duty.

 

Click here to read the full editorial on The New York Times Opinionator.