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Great concept. Very interesting, entertaining, amusing, and informative.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I found it fascinating to read about some of the behind-the-scenes workings of how many of my favorite books finally arrived at their title. It was very amusing to see the back-and-forth struggles between editors and authors over a book’s title. Although not a how-to book, this small, short, amusing book will certainly appeal to every writer and editor.

The book discusses over 100 different famous books of fiction, such as Jaws, The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and how their title came to be. One of my favorites is the story of Gone With The Wind. It was first called Pansy, then changed to Tote the Weary Load, and then to Tomorrow is Another Day.

Bernard’s book also has great advice, sprinkled throughout the book, from authors and editors about choosing a title. One of my favorites is a quote by Walker Percy: “A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”

Some historic literary facts are also given for many of the titles. One of my favorites is the story about Lewis Carroll being the first one to suggest to his publisher that the dust jacket carry the title of the book. Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark became the first book to be published with a printed jacket.

In Bernard’s Introduction, he says that this book is an “. . . an anecdotal account of how some of the most well-known book and play titles come to be. It is not meant to be a comprehensive compendium of every catchy title, but rather a lighthearted look at a struggle that has bedeviled writers for centuries.”

As an author and publisher I can really appreciate how important a title can be to the financial success of a book. Nowadays, a title must not only be catchy, but also be key-word-rich, and search-engine-friendly if you have any hope of it being found on the internet. The proper title is essential if you want your publication to stand out from the huge number of publications that are published every day. If you are an author or publisher, you will certainly know that a good title is an essential part of a successful marketing plan for any publication. In Bernard’s book you will read about very famous authors going through the same (but on a much less sophisticated level) agonizing process that we authors and publishers go through today. Nowadays, developing the best title is even more important than it was when most of the books discussed in Bernard’s book were written. But it was still very interesting to see how these famous authors and big-name publishers dealt with this important process.

This article was written by Joseph C. Kunz, Jr. and originally posted on KunzOnPublishing.com

This post, by Stroppy Author, originally appeared on the Stroppy Author’s Guide to Publishing blog on 5/24/12.

‘Earning out’ is what you hope your book will do. Remember the advance? It’s what the publisher paid you a very long time ago when you started/sold your book. We talked about the advance at the start of How to speak publisher.

Your book earns out if/when it has earned enough in royalties to cover the advance the publisher paid you. Here’s a bit of simple maths. Simple, I said. Don’t hide behind the sofa, there. Maths is your friend – don’t leave it to the publisher or your agent.

Stroppy Author gets an advance of £5,000 – hurray!

Stroppy Author’s book sells for £10 a copy.

Stroppy Author gets a royalty of 10% – hurray!

This means that the royalty on each copy is 10% of £10 = £1

These are not real figures; this never happens – but that’s the principle.

While we’re on maths, let’s do a spot of counting.
The press likes to shout about six-figure advances. This is to confuse people, who usually assume that a six-figure advance is a million pounds/dollars/euros. It isn’t – a six-figure advance is one represented by a number that has six digits, so it is £100,000 (or $100,000) or more. Count the figures: a 1 and five 0s, that’s six. Don’t count the comma. So if you hear that an author has a five-figure advance, that means they have £/$10,000 or more, which is not necessarily very much. Obviously £99,000 is quite a lot; but $10,000 is not.

Some books never earn out their advance and are not even really expected to. If a publisher pays an advance of £300,000, this is largely to grab a lot of publicity. The book might earn out, but no one will be hugely surprised if it doesn’t because a lot of these gambles don’t pay off. To the author, the big advance seems to be a sign that the publisher is certain their book will be a bestseller. In fact, it’s a sign that the publisher hopes their book will be a bestseller and thinks there’s a pretty good chance it will be. But it’s cheaper to pay an advance of £300,000 and get lots of free press coverage than to invest in posters all over the underground and buses. The publisher can still make a huge profit even if this book doesn’t earn out.

How quickly your book earns out depends on the following factors:

• how large the advance was in the first place
• the royalty rate
• the price the books sell for.

There is a lot of room for wild variation here. Advances range from zero to £/$1,000,000. Royalty rates range from less than 1% to 10% (sometimes even higher after some massive number of sales – but very rarely). Books sell for anything from cover price to 90% discount. At some levels of discount, the royalty might disappear completely. This is generally to cover the publisher shifting the remaining copies for next-to-nothing when they’ve decided to give up on it.

Read the rest of the post on the Stroppy Author’s Guide to Publishing blog.

This post, by Maria Popova, originally appeared on brain pickings on 6/7/12.

The literary hero in his own words.

What a tragic season it’s been for literary heroes who defined generations of readers and creators. Last month, we lost Maurice Sendak, and this week, Ray Bradbury — beloved author, champion of curiosity, relentless advocate of libraries — passed way at the age of 91. To celebrate his life and legacy, here are eleven of his most timeless insights on writing, culture, creativity, failure, happiness, and more.

On doing what you love, in this wonderful 2008 video interview from the National Endowment for the Arts:

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

On art, in Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You:

We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.

On reading as a prerequisite for democracy, from the same 2008 NEA interview:

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

On creativity and the myth of the muse, in Zen in the Art of Writing:

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

On creative purpose and perseverance in the face of rejection, in Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life:

[S]tarting when I was fifteen I began to send short stories to magazines like Esquire, and they, very promptly, sent them back two days before they got them! I have several walls in several rooms of my house covered with the snowstorm of rejections, but they didn’t realize what a strong person I was; I persevered and wrote a thousand more dreadful short stories, which were rejected in turn. Then, during the late forties, I actually began to sell short stories and accomplished some sort of deliverance from snowstorms in my fourth decade. But even today, my latest books of short stories contain at least seven stories that were rejected by every magazine in the United States and also in Sweden! So … take heart from this. The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 6 more quotes from Ray Bradbury, on brain pickings.

This post, by Neil Gaiman, originally appeared on The Guardian UK on 6/6/12.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman remembers his friend Ray Bradbury who has died at the age of 91

Yesterday afternoon I was in a studio recording an audiobook version of short story I had written for Ray Bradbury‘s 90th birthday. It’s a monologue called The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury, and was a way of talking about the impact that Ray Bradbury had on me as a boy, and as an adult, and, as far as I could, about what he had done to the world. And I wrote it last year as a love letter and as a thank you and as a birthday present for an author who made me dream, taught me about words and what they could accomplish, and who never let me down as a reader or as a person as I grew up.

Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when he was a boy of 11 or 12 he met Ray Bradbury. When Bradbury found out that he wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can’t write one book and stop. That it’s work, but the best kind of work. My friend grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.

Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.

I encountered Ray Bradbury’s stories as a boy. The first one I read was Homecoming, about a human child in a world of Addams Family-style monsters, who wanted to fit in. It was the first time anyone had ever written a story that spoke to me personally. There was a copy of The Silver Locusts (the UK title of The Martian Chronicles) knocking about my house. I read it, loved it, and bought all the Bradbury books I could from the travelling bookshop that set up once a term in my school. I learned about Poe from Bradbury. There was poetry in the short stories, and it didn’t matter that I was missing so much as a boy: what I took from the stories was enough.

Read the rest of the post on The Guardian UK.

I have big dreams as a writer, and as an entrepreneur.

But I often try to squash those dreams down because they feel too egocentric or too ambitious or too unreasonable. Not sensible at all. And I have always been a sensible girl, taking everything very seriously! I try to be practical and pragmatic and realistic.

But today I read this passage from the brilliant Julia Cameron in  The Sound of Paper, an excellent book to dip into for creative inspiration.

“A great deal of the time we dismiss our longings on the grounds that they aren’t reasonable – and often they aren’t. Where did we get the idea that life was intended to be reasonable? … We have very little evidence that sensible and frugal are actually qualities cherished by the Great Creator … Most of us have a dream that we could set sail if only we dared … Rather than act on these dreams, we often shoo them from our consciousness, saying ‘I need to be sensible. I would never be able to manage that.’ But perhaps we can manage more than we think.”

This passage challenged me, so I am sharing my big dreams with you. Please share yours with me in the comments. Maybe together we can make some of them come true – even if it takes this writer’s lifetime.

• I want to be a brand name fiction author – which means becoming an excellent, commercial fiction writer and all that entails
   
• I want to be a New York Times bestselling fiction author
   
• I want to write a James Bond book – maybe be the first women to do so – and have a book launch with a fantastic sports car and hot guys in tuxedos flanking me in a scarlet dress (inspired by the launch of Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver)
   
• I want my books to be made into action adventure movies, preferably featuring Angelina Jolie, and I want to walk down the red carpet at the premier
   
• and yes, I want to be on the Forbes list of the highest paid authors

Nothing too ambitious then?!

These dreams may be crazy and ambitious, but I also know the difference between dreams and goals. My current goal is to get the third novel in my ARKANE series, Exodus, finished before July. I know I can achieve that goal.

But our dreams feed our goals, inspire us and keep us focused on the future. I’ve always wanted to be a brand name fiction author, that’s a little guilty secret from years ago, but I am definitely closer now than I was 3 years ago. Back then I didn’t even have one novel. Our dreams have to start somewhere, right?

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments [below the original post, here]. 

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

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

When it is running at its peak, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing gets over 30,000 hits per day.

This traffic means nothing to me personally. I don’t care about fame for fame’s sake. I don’t care about what people think of me. I’m as immune to detractors as I am to those who offer praise, and I get plenty of both. It’s nice to be thought of, but that’s not what lights my fire.

This traffic means nothing to me financially. The majority of those who read this blog are writers, not fans. Readers don’t care about the publishing industry. While I have, on occasion, used this platform to promote a book, it is almost always linked to a point I’m trying to make, an argument I’m trying to present. I don’t have paid ads on this blog, or my website. A Newbie’s Guide doesn’t generate any direct income for me, and any indirect income is unverifiable.

This traffic means nothing to me altruistically. While I know this blog has helped many writers by informing, persuading, and inspiring, it is impossible to be directly connected to that many people. I get dozens of "thank yous" a week. It’s flattering, but I stopped taking it personally a long time ago. I don’t write this blog to help people, or make the world a better place.

But I do care about traffic. I want as many people to visit this blog as possible. Not for my ego or my bank account. Not for any cause celebre or romantic notions of fighting the system.

This blog exists as a tool to help me learn.

There is a certain amount to be personally gained from writing persuasive essays, from presenting arguments using logic and facts, from sharing information. Doing so helps me improve my debating skills and hone my position and distill my thoughts.

But everything I write is already in my brain. That’s not the way to learn. Knowledge comes from seeking outside sources of information, from looking at other points of view, from being forced to defend an argument or position from an attack that hadn’t been considered, from changing viewpoints as new information or better logic presents itself.

I go looking for that information. But there’s also another way to obtain it. Namely, to host a forum, and let the information come to me in the form of comments.

This blog would not exist without the commentors. And if you’re a regular visitor, you know how long these comment threads can go on. How many blogs get 600 comments in a single thread? How many people leave a message saying "I learned just as much from the comments as the post"?

I read every comment. I hardly ever reply to praise, or thanks. But I do reply to those who disagree, who try to disprove whatever point I attempted to make in the blog post. I also respond to whiny, anonymous pinheads.

We’ll get back to the pinheads in a moment.

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

This post, by Dean Wesley Smith, originally appeared on his site on 2/5/11.

Truth: The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble. Far more trouble than they had with traditional publishing only. We are in a new golden age of fiction. The first golden age was the pulp age. Speed of writing was celebrated in that time and it will be this time around as well.

Okay, say it: I have no fear. Or better yet, I’m as dumb as they come for bringing up the subject of speed of writing. Speed of writing is the third rail in publishing, but in the discussion of the new world of publishing, it has to be talked about. So here I go.

Personal Information First

I am not a fast typist, which most people think as fast writing. As many of you have watched in my accounts of writing my challenge stories, I tend to average around one page, 250 words, in about 15 minutes. I tend to write for about an hour before my mind shuts down and I have to walk around and take a break and then come back. I am not yet a touch typist, but slowly my two finger method has worked over to using four fingers. Using all ten fingers to type will never happen in my lifetime.

When I say “fast writer” I don’t mean fast typist. I hope everyone is clear on that. I am a slow typist, yet a fast writer.

I’ll explain how that can be. Stay with me.

Now Some Evil Math

250 words is about one manuscript page if you have your margins correct, and font size large enough for an editor to read, and double-spaced your page. You know, professional manuscript format. (Most of you don’t know that, I have learned, but you assume you do.)

Most people’s e-mails to me, and some of the questions in the comments sections are longer than 250 words. I’ve seen some people do 250 words in tweets in under five minutes.

250 Words = 1 Manuscript Page.

A standard novel for the sake of this discussion is 90,000 words long. So divide 90,000 words by 250 words and you get 360 manuscript pages.

So if a person spent 15 minutes per day and wrote 250 words, that person would finish a novel in one year.

Now, if that person spent 1/2 hour per day on writing and created 500 words per day, they would finish 2 novels per year and be considered prolific by many people.

Write 1,000 words per day, or about an hour, and in 270 days you would have finished three novels. And that means you would only have to do that five days a week to write three novels per year.  In other words, it doesn’t take many hours to be considered prolific.

That is why I am considered prolific. I don’t type faster with my little four-finger typing, I just write more hours than most.

(Yeah, yeah, I know, simplistic, but mostly right.)

I am considered a fast writer because I spend more hours writing. Nothing more.

The Myths of Writing Faster.

Read the rest of the post on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.

My last blog, How To Be Seen And Get Noticed, dealt with the national level booksellers’ organization. There are also regional bookseller organizations who host tradeshows in the fall and provide much more affordable venues for authors and publishers. The following is information on these organizations and their contact information:

Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association
Cynthia Compton (GLIBA President)

4 Kids Books and Toys
4450 Weston Pointe Drive

Zionsville, IN 46077
(317) 733-8710

E-Mail: kidsbooks4@msn.com

Deborah Leonard (GLIBA Executive Director)

GLIBA
2113 Roosevelt

Ypsilanti, MI 48197
(888) 736-3096, (734) 340-6397  
Fax: (734) 879-1129
E-Mail: deb@gliba.org

Midwest Independent Booksellers Association
Chris Livingston (MIBA President)

The Book Shelf

162 West 2nd Street
Winona, MN 55987
(507) 474-1880
E-Mail: chris@bookshelfwinona.com

Carrie Obry (MIBA Executive Director)
Kati Gallagher (MIBA Assistant Director)

2355 Louisiana Avenue North, Suite A

Golden Valley, MN 55427

(800) 784-7522, (763) 544-2993  
Fax: (763) 544-2266

E-Mail:  carrie@midwestbooksellers.org

kati@midwestbooksellers.org

Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association
Meghan Goel (MPIBA President)

BookPeople Bookstore
603 North Lamar Boulevard

Austin, TX 78703
(512) 472-5050 
(Fax) 512-482-8495
E-Mail: kids_buyer@bookpeople.com

Laura Ayrey (MPIBA Executive Director)

8020 Springshire Drive

Park City, UT 84098
(435) 649-6079  
Fax: (435) 649-6105

E-Mail: laura@mountainsplains.org

New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association
Lucy Kogler (NAIBA President)
Talking Leaves Inc.
951 Elmwood Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14222
(716) 884-9524
Fax (716) 332-3625
E-Mail: lucyk@tleavesbooks.com

Eileen Dengler (NAIBA Executive Director)

2667 Hyacinth St.

Westbury, NY 11590
(516) 333-0681  
Fax: (516) 333-0689
E-Mail: info@naiba.com

New England Independent Booksellers Association
Anne Philbrick (NEIBA President)                      
Bank Square Books                        

53 W. Main Street                        

Mystic, CT 06355                        

(860) 536-3795   
Fax: (860) 536-8426           
E-mail: banksquarebks@msn.com

Steve Fischer (NEIBA Executive Director)

1955 Massachusetts Avenue, #2

Cambridge, MA 02140
(781) 316-8894
  Fax: (781) 316-2605
E-Mail: steve@neba.org

New Orleans-Gulf South Booksellers Association
Britton Trice (Chair)

Garden District Bookshop 

2727 Prytania St.

New Orleans, LA 70130

(504) 895-2266
  Fax: (504) 895-0111

E-Mail: betbooks@aol.com

Northern California Independent Booksellers Association
Mike Barnard (NCIBA President)

Rakestraw Books

522 Hartz Avenue

Danville, CA 94526-3808

(925) 837-7337

Hut Landon (NCIBA Executive Director)

The Presidio

P.O. Box 29169 (mail)

37 Graham St. (delivery)

San Francisco, CA 94129
(415) 561-7686  Fax: (415) 561-7685
E-Mail: office@nciba.com

Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
Jamil Zaidi (PNBA President)

The Elliott Bay Book Company 

1521 10th Ave.

Seattle, WA 98122

(206) 624-6600
  Fax: (206) 903-1601

E- Mail: jzaidi@elliottbaybook.com

Thom Chambliss (PNBA Executive Director)
338 West 11th Ave., #108

Eugene, OR 97401-3062

(541) 683-4363
  Fax: (541) 683-3910
E-Mail: info@pnba.org

Southern California Independent Booksellers Association
Andrea Vuleta (SCIBA President) 

Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Book Shop
1030 Bonita Avenue 
La Verne, California 91750-5108
(909) 599-4558

Jennifer Bigelow (SCIBA Executive Director)

133 N. Altadena Drive

Pasadena, California 91107
(626) 793-7403
  Fax: (626) 792-1402

E-Mail: jbigelow@scibabooks.org

Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance
Kelly Justice (SIBA President)

Fountain Bookstore

Historic Shockoe Slip

1312 E. Cary St.
Richmond, VA 23219
(804) 788-1594  
Fax: (804) 788-0445

E-Mail: fountain.bookstore@verizon.net

Wanda Jewell (SIBA Executive Director)

Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 

3806 Yale Ave.

Columbia, SC 29205

(803) 994-9530
  Fax: (803) 779-0113
E-Mail: info@sibaweb.com

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

This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 5/22/12.

Time for my annual, “Nope, you shouldn’t be writing, quit now, run away, go on, shoo” post. This time, in the form of the “25 things” lists that all you crazy cats and kittens seem to love so much.

1. It’s Really Hard

OMG YOU GUYS. Writing? It’s hard. It’s like, you have to sit there? And you have to make stuff up? For a living? And there’s all this… typing involved. You know what’s easier? Being an adult Baby Huey. Diaper-swaddled. Able to just pee where you sit. Your food liquified into a nutrient slurry and fed to you via a tube pushed through the grate of your giant human hamster cage. Okay, I kid, I kid. Writing actually is work. Intellectually and emotionally. You actually have to sit, day in and day out, and trudge through the mire of your own word count. Quit now. Save yourself from pulling a mental hammy.

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

2. You Probably Don’t Have Time

Writing takes time you do not possess. You’ve got that day job and those kids and, hey, let’s not forget your 37th replay of the entire Mass Effect series. Your time is all buttoned up in a starchy little shirt. Sure, Stephen King carved out his first novel one handwritten line at a time in between moments at his factory job, but if I recall, that didn’t pay off for him. (He should’ve just stayed working at that factory. Uh, hello, have you ever heard of medical benefits, Stevie? A pension? Lunch breaks? Duh.) Besides, eventually you’re just going to die anyway. Time won’t matter and it’s not like they’re gonna let you read your own books in hell. Better to quit now. Free up some time for drinking and masturbation. Er, I mean, “parenting.”

3. You May Have To Write A Whole Lot

Recently it came out that for writers to survive, they might have to buckle down and write more. Well, that’s just a cockamamie doo-doo bomb is what it is. That means writers might need to write — *checks some math, fiddles with an abacus, doodles a bunch of dongs in the margin* — more than 250 words a day?! Whoa. Whoa. Slow your roll, slave driver! I mean, it’s not like writing is fun. It’s an endless Sisyphean dick-punch is what it is. (See, Sisyphus carried an old CRT television up a dusty knoll, and when he got to the top, a faun punched him in the dick and knocked him back down the hill. That’s Greek history, son.) Write more? Eeeesh. Better to complain about it, instead. Or, better still: quit.

4. I Bet You’re Not That Good

I’ve seen your work. C’mon. C’mon. This is just between us, now. It’s not that good, is it? Lots of spelling errors. Commas breeding like ringworm in the petri dish that is a hobo’s crotch. All the structure of an upended bucket of donkey vomit. The last time an agent looked at your work, she sent it back wrapped around a hand grenade. So, you’ll do what so many other mediocre, untested, unwilling-to-work-to-improve writers have done: you self-publish, joining the throngs of the well-below-average with your ill-kerned Microsoft Paint cover and your 50,000 words of medical waste. Why do that to the world? Have mercy!

5. Hell, Maybe You’re Too Good

Alternately, you might be too talented. Your works are literary masterpieces, as if Raymond Carver, James Joyce and Don DeLillo contributed their authorial seed and poured it on the earth where it grew the tree that would one day be slaughtered to provide the paper for your magnum opus. And meanwhile, someone goes and writes porny Twilight fan-fiction and gets a billion-dollar book deal thanks to the tepid BDSM fantasies of housewives everywhere. You’re just too good for this. As you seem unwilling to write the S&M fan-fic version of The Hunger Games for a seven-figure-deal… well. This way to the great egress!

6. Ugh, Learning, Ptoo, Ptoo

“All you have to do to be a writer is read and write,” they said. Which seems true of anything, of course — “All you have to do to be a sculptor is look at sculptures and sculpt some stuff,” or, “All you have to do to be a nuclear physicist is read signs at a nuclear power plant and do a shitload of nuclear physics.” But then you went and read books and blogs and Playboy magazine articles and the backs of countless cereal boxes and then you tried writing and oh snap it turns out you still have more to learn. And learning is yucky. Ew, gross. Dirty, dirty learning. Not fun. Takes effort. Bleah.

7. Finish Him, Fatality

“I’m writing a novel,” you say. And they ask you, “Oh, is this the same one you were writing last year? And the year before that? And the year before that?” And you say, “No, those were different ones. I decided that–” And at this point you make up some excuse about publishing trends or writer’s block or The Muse, but it all adds up to the same thing: you’re not very good at finishing what you start. Your life is littered with the dessicated corpses of countless incomplete manuscripts, characters whose lives are woefully cut short by your +7 Axe of Apathy. You’re so good at not finishing, embrace this skill and quit.

8. Rejection Will Make You A Sad Koala

You will be buried in the heaps and mounds of rejection. And it’s never nice, never fun. Sometimes you’ll get the cold and dispassionate form rejection slips with a list of checkboxes. Sometimes you’ll get the really mean, really personal ones that stab for your heart with a sharpened toothbrush shiv (I once got a rejection slip early in my career from author and then-editor Thomas Monteleone that pretty much… savaged me rectally). Rejection will ruin your day. And, if you do get published, bad reviews will haunt you the same way. Did you know that every time I get a one-star review for Blackbirds, my eczema flairs up? I get all scaly and itchy and then I’m forced to fight Spider-Man as my supervillain persona, “The Rash-o-man.” (My comic book is told from multiple perspectives!) Anyway. Point is, rejections and reviews hurt. Don’t thrust your chin out so it can get punched. Hide in your attic and eat Cheetos, instead.

9. You Don’t Want It Bad Enough

You have to want this writing thing really bad. Sure, the saying goes that “everybody has a novel in them,” but thank fuck most of those people are too lazy to surgically extract said novel. I’ll just leave this one to the wisdom of Ron Swanson: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

10. Writing Really Cuts Into Your Internet Addiction

The Internet is like a… delightful hole you fall into, a Wonderland of porn and memes and tweets and porn and hate and cats and porn. I’m always wishing I had more time to just drunkenly fumble around the Internet, feeling its greasy curves and exploring its hidden flesh-knolls, but all this damn writing keeps getting in the way. “Oh, god, if I didn’t have this stupid book to write I’d be tweeting scathing witticisms and scouring the web for free ‘people-dressed-up-as-trees-and-flowers-and-pollinating-one-another’ porn.” (If people who dress up as animals and do it are called “furries,” what are people who dress up like plants? “Leafies?” “Greenos?”) Anyway. Quit now. Free up your time.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 15 more reasons, on terribleminds.

This post, by Mark David Gerson, originally appeared on his site on 11/16/11.

Read the rest of the post on Mark David Gerson’s site.

I’m now a member of publestariat.com and looking forward to making new friends and hearing your news and comments. I’m doing my first sign-in and looking around. 🙂

JackieJGriffey

This post, by Janet Kobobel Grant, origiinally appeared on the Books & Such Literary Agency blog on 5/14/12.

The other day I was talking with an editor about digital rights the publisher wanted back even though those rights had reverted to my client. I was surprised to hear her say: “We have ended up promoting authors’ books that are published by other publishers when we offered titles for free. That offer cost us, but other publishers benefited.”

I found myself thinking: “Welcome to the new world of publishing. Why are you surprised by that?” Neat lines of loyalty to publishers have melted away. But even so, doesn’t it benefit each publisher if all of an author’s titles sell well? When the water rises, it raises the entire boat. Yet the editor clearly thought of her publishing house as being in competition with other publishers, and she couldn’t imagine why she should help another publisher. That’s kind of an old-fashioned thought. While publishers might end up competing for a certain title or author, generally publishers are in competition with self-publishing, not each other. Which leads me to my next point of surprise in that conversation.

The editor went on to say that she found it disturbing that I had pointed out to her that my client could make more money by self-publishing her digital titles rather than returning them to the publisher, who intended to use those titles to promote my client’s other titles. In other words, those digital rights were useful to the publisher to make money off of other titles. But I have to weigh how much money my client could lose by reassigning those digital rights to the publisher. Why should the publisher be offended? It’s my job to think about all the angles of such a decision.

That exchange with the editor was one of several instances I’ve experienced that demonstrates publishers, agents, and authors all feel disenfranchised. The publishers feel wronged and wonder what happened to loyalty. The authors wonder what happened to publishers who worked hard and over the long-term to build careers. And agents wonder what happened to a world in which their major job was to place clients’ work with publishing houses.

That’s my point: Everyone feels disenfranchised and disrespected. Feelings run strong and deep on every side.

Read the rest of the post on the Books & Such Literary blog.

 Hi, I’m Tomara  Conner last summer I wrote a novel called "Nightwalkers" it’s like my baby and i’m finially ready to send her out into the cruel world.  I’m not the best at grammar and you can probably all see that by my novel but still…I try my hardest.  So if you guys don’t mind please check out my novel Nightwalkers.