Lending A Helping Hand

 

This week in publishing news,

The Los Angeles Times published a big article on the #Disneymustpay saga with quotes from the action team and a deep dive into the way Disney interprets contracts. I’ll bet there were fist pumps everywhere…also a lot of L A creators and lawyers checking over contracts. Hometown karma for Disney.

 

Instagram is flirting with NFT’s. This story from Techcrunch is interesting because Instagram is opening up a marketplace that a lot of people have access to. If you aren’t sure about NFT’s yet, keep an open mind and read the article. When we all live in our virtual reality life it might be handy knowledge.

 

The Society of Authors in the UK has a campaign running for the reform of hybrid publishers. There are legit hybrid publishers out there and there are some shady ones, very shady ones. Check Writer Beware if you want to be really sure about how your publisher stacks up.

 

Meanwhile, across the pond, The American Library Association is fighting back against all the book banning that has been going on. They have collected a formidable group of organisations to help them highlight this growing problem. I was shocked when I realised that ¾’s of the books banned were from marginalised writers. I didn’t realise it was so high. 

 

The New Publishing Standard always has an eye on what is happening around the rest of the world. This week they published an article about Sweden’s very high take up of audio subscriptions. 

 

Juliet Marillier has a great article on Writer Unboxed this week on supporting other writers. She lists a few ways you can do this. One of the easiest is to write a review as everybody knows that each review is gold. Juliet has a few other ideas to add and there are more in the comments.

 

Kris Rusch has an interesting article this week on How Writer’s Fail. As I was reading it I was thinking that optimism is a key ingredient for being a writer. You have to be optimistic to start writing, to continue writing, to finish, to revise, and to keep writing in spite of everything trying to stop you. Nurturing this mindset is the biggest and best thing we can do for ourselves and others. 

 

Colleen Story has a great website, Writing and Wellness. Here are two posts that nurture writers if you need a mental hug. Quotes to encourage you to keep going and Ways to make your writing mornings more awesome.

 

In The Craft Section,

Plot vs Story- September Fawkes- Bookmark

Can a writer quote song lyrics?-Anne R Allen- Bookmark

The difference between plot and story and why you need both- Heather Davis

Ten tools for writers – Kathy Steinemann

Bad Book Descriptions- Book Riot

 

In The Marketing Section,

How to write an author bio- Beth Barany- Bookmark

Can you revive a dead book- Dave Chesson  Bookmark

Book Launch Calendar- Scribe Media

Creating your copyright page – Alliance of Independent Authors – Bookmark

How to work with your graphic designer- Colleen Story

To Finish

The dream team of Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are celebrating this week. It is ten years since they launched the Emotion Thesaurus. This blue book has been bought by writers all over the world and translated into other languages. Along the way, it has been joined by other books in the series. They reach out to help writers every single day with their resources. Angela and Becca have put together a fantastic prize pack of resources as a 10^th anniversary celebration. Enter to win or send a message of congratulations for a top notch resource. 

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

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Pic:Photo by Hanna Morris on Unsplash

Feeling The Emotion

ANZAC day* is always emotional. Whether you are braving the chilly dawn for the memorial service or later in the day at a full civic ceremony...there is always the tear in the eye, the tight feeling in your throat. On this day I think of all the members of my family who served in their different wars and are still serving. The one who didn’t come back in 1916, age 23 with no known grave...his brother, my grandfather who did. My husband’s grandfather, one of less than 200 that survived Gallipoli and the Western Front. ANZAC day is always harder when one of our family is overseas serving as a Peacekeeper.

When we were overseas last year, we met a Turk on a train in Italy. It was a special moment as we both talked about the war that forged our two nations. Each of us had a story to tell about visiting Gallipoli and crying. He talked about seeing a fused piece of metal, the result of 25 bullets that all hit together at once.

What a hell it must have been!

In the blogosphere this week a different kind of war was happening as reaction to Barry Eisler’s keynote address to the Pikes Peak writer’s conference was furiously debated on Twitter. Agents and Publishers taking exception to Barry’s comments that Legacy publishing was a lottery and their only value was for print distribution deals. Once the hot comments were out of the way and agents and publishers climbed down off the ceiling...debate was more constructive. Read the comments people...but give yourself some time...

In the last year very successful indie e-publishers have begun partnering with big publishers for print only deals and agents are becoming publishers on the side, organising editing, covers and marketing of eBooks or POD...it is pretty easy to see Barry Eisler’s point.

The London Book Fair has just wrapped up and there was lively debate around the changing nature of agents. So do you want a manager, a partner, a business coach...or a deal maker? And No an Agent is not necessarily going to do all of that.

Joanna Penn was also thrilled to be at the Fair. She has a huge blog post filled with video interviews and comments about the 2013 Fair, which had the most writers attend ever. Take some time over this one.

Joel Friedlander talks about his war on Word...how Word won...and what he is doing about it. Check it out and get a great deal on his solution!

Seven Steps To The Perfect Story is one of those amazing graphics that you really want to print out, stick on your wall and gaze at for a long time.

Myths about Query letters to Agents...don’t get too worried.

Elizabeth Spann Craig has been looking at Audio books and ACX. This is a feel good post telling you how to use ACX.

In Craft, It is all about Character Emotion...

3 Tips For Realistic Character Emotion

Real Life Diagnostics- Hooking The Reader- Janice Hardy dissects a submission.

Susan Sipal dissects your favourite Harry Potter Character Emotion Arc’s

4 Things You Need To Understand About Character Emotion...great roundup here.

Dropping into the Emotion Thesaurus, it’s all about sarcasm....

To Finish,

Roz Morris talks about Obituaries and why they are so important for writers...

maureen

*ANZAC Australian and New Zealand Army Corps remember their fallen soldiers on 25^th April the date of the landing of the Corps at Gallipoli in Turkey 1915. New Zealand lost ¼ of their men and more than ½ were severely wounded. The Turks lost twice as many allied casualties and their leader Ataturk Kemal became the Father of Modern Turkey. After a disastrous nine months the Allies left the peninsular in the dead of night leaving behind more than 44000 dead to lie with 87000 dead Turks. New Zealand suffered the largest casualties relative to their population of any Allied Nation and the campaign changed forever both Turkey, who won, and Australia and New Zealand, who lost but found and forged their own national identities away from Britain.

I saw Dire Straits perform this live when I was 21...it never fails to remind me of the loss and weariness of war and the need for Peace.

Choosing To Be Creative

This week on the writing blogosphere RAOK has been the catch phrase. 

Random Acts Of Kindness. This has been started because Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have finally made a print version of their wonderful Emotion Thesaurus and they celebrated with a RAOK blitz week which lots of writers got behind.

The Indie vs Trad argument has been heating up with many diatribes on both sides hitting the blogosphere this week.

Just for the record...You don’t have to be one or the other. You can choose the publishing medium with each project. You can be small press, Indie press, mainstream, give stuff away for free to build readers. It is up to you. Don’t get sucked into the Trad is bad or Indie is to die camps which diss each other and lose sight of the whole picture.

Anne R Allen has a nice piece about the bullies of both sides and what a new writer should be doing...take your time!

I post weekly and weekly it seems is the nature of change in the publishing landscape. This week Waterstones, a large bookselling chain in the UK has announced a partnership deal with Amazon. Some commentators have likened this to the hens asking the Fox to move into the henhouse. Here is Futurebooks take on this breaking news and the gamble and possible benefits for the booksellers.

Chuck has his 25 reasons to quit writing...of course you can turn it on its ear and choose to write. Either way Chuck is always thought provoking...(warning it is Chuck!)

Sometimes tho the act of writing is painful. Roz Morris looks at coping with RSI and what she has had to do to get through these times. I know this from bitter experience and am writing these words with tingling feelings in my left hand. (off to find my brace...)

In the craft corner, Here are some great posts on

Converting back story into character from Romance University

Margie Lawson looks at humour and the use of it to hook readers

20 craft rules from Stephen King

Mary Kole straight talks about Sounds great, No substance.

K M Weiland looks at not sabotaging your main character.

How to write from the Male point of view.

Great tips

Jane Friedman has some tips on getting the best online advertising for your dollar.

Joanna Penn talks multi media and why different media can complement your brand. 

Janice Hardy has ways that you can be more productive. 

Writers Digest has the definitive info on word counts for each genre.

Melinda Szymanik has a great post on the importance of being at the Frankfurt book fair with this year’s fair focussing on Kidlit.

And I will leave you with the video that is making waves through the creative community. This week Neil Gaiman gave the commencement speech at the University of Arts...These are words to live by no matter what stage of creative endeavour you are.

maureen

Author Websites and the Personal Brand....

I’m over rain...and yes I know we were all praying for rain two months ago when we were facing a country wide drought but all those collective prayers seem to have been answered this last week in constant downpours so that we are looking at floods.

So now that we are stuck inside, our attention turns to Social Networking sites...coz I’m researching them for a little project.

As part of your brand profile publishers expect you to be social networking as well. Now some authors engage with their readers very well on facebook but it is a time suck. After all the business of being an author is writing. So before you set up your facebook fan page, your twitter account, your blog, sit down and make up a profile plan. Where do you want to spend your time?

Dan Schawbel of Personal Branding Blog has written an interesting article that has been posted all over the web this week entitled R.I.P Facebook. He has some pertinent things to say about personal branding and one of them is devote your energy to YOUR website not someone else’s!

So with this in mind I am revisiting author websites.

What should an Author website do?

Bookmarketingmaven has a short post profiling some excellent author websites.

Yael Miller has a guest post on Tony Eldridge’s blog about good web design for authors.

 Publetariat has reprinted a page from Joanna Penn about a great example of an author website. Make sure people can buy your book!!! That is the big message but there are lots of other important little snippets as well...profile... engage readers...FAQs...flash stuff....

Writer Tools

Joanna Penn is a great source of advice. She has successfully self published three books and has a huge following for her blog and website.  On her blog, thecreativepenn, this week she has a guest post focussing on 22 websites every writer must use. It is a great list. There are some great new sites to check out. Two from the list are 3D Animated Avatars for your characters and an Emotion Thesaurus (this is a wonderful resource compiled every Thursday by children’s writer Angela Ackerman.)

Icyte is a great bookmarking site that takes bookmarking to a whole new level. Your bookmarked web pages are always available stored with your highlighted tags and comments so you can access them on other computers or servers. This is especially interesting if you are researching or working collaboratively on a project.

For more ideas on author websites check out my Marketing 101 series. 

In the Blogosphere this week.

B.E.A. (Book Expo America) is underway. Check out Alice, in the sidebar-she's blogging from it. 

Galleycat has links to hot topics at the Expo including  this little video where the CEO of Figment Publishing talks about their latest initiative to bring cellphone novels to American teens.

There is a lot of comment flying thick and fast over Neil Gaiman getting 40K to speak at a library.

Neil is bemused by it and his blog post on the subject is very interesting. I always knew he was a great guy!!! More power to him I say...(holding signed copy of The Graveyard Book close to chest and sighing...)

Over on Craicerplus (myAmplify page) I have links to articles on

The Konrath effect - Will technology ruin new authors?

Ask The Publishing Guru - Choosing a title for your novel. (This one started some interesting comment on facebook)

The Feckless Goblin - 9 unsavoury characters traits of real authors (ouch)

From Victoria Mixon – 7 reasons to be glad that you are a writer. (ohhhhhh)

George Orwell, Mills and Boon writer: Taking literary mashups to the next level (ideas for your next masterpiece)

Enjoy,


maureen

pic is the master himself... Neil Gaiman