Happy All Hallows Eve,
A couple of years ago Young Adult writers decided to hand
out scary books to trick or treaters...and it has gained a following amongst
the writing community in the countries that celebrate Halloween as a cultural
festival. All Hallows Read...go to your local second hand bookstore...buy up
ghostly children’s books and R L Stines...and hand them out.
This week in the publishing blogosphere there was a flutter
as Larry Kirshbaum announced he was going back to agenting after heading up
Amazon’s print publishing operation. Larry was up against it, when he was hired
two years ago as all the bookstores holding onto deals with publishers decided they wouldn’t stock Amazon printed books. Traditional Publishing pundits have
taken a ‘We Won Against The Mighty
‘Zon’ attitude but others aren’t so sure... Anyway you look at it, the authors
are the ones suffering with poor print sales and no exposure to the bookstore
browser. If the Mighty ‘Zon ever works out distribution into the bookstores for
print books... the game will be changed.
In the blogosphere
it is NaNoWriMo time and tips abound for how to tackle the month where everyone
tries to write their 50,000 word opus. Editors and agents are shuddering
because December heralds all these manuscripts hitting their floors. Many of
them are saying they won’t look at a book that arrives in December because it
won’t have moved beyond a first draft.
If you are not
heading into the bunker to write you may be interested in the changing
ownership hop of Figment, the teen writing community that keeps getting bought by very big publishers.... If I was very cynical I’d wonder whether they were keen to get their hands on the next big young thing who knows nothing about the
cut throat business of publishing.... Lucky I’m not.... Dave Gaughren has a good blog post on this subject.
A Publishers Weekly article this week is definitely scaring quite a few people. The article has anonymous
agents and editors saying publishers are beginning to carefully change contract
wording so it doesn’t say what format they will publish the book in. If
publishers don’t commit to a print edition or they go to a POD print edition so
that rights will never revert back...or the Print edition will be under their
new imprint where the writer pays costs (read Author Solutions here) then
writer’s dreams may rapidly turn to nightmares.
A couple of weeks
ago I was looking for a comparison piece on the indie music scene and the indie
publishing scene and couldn’t find one and then into my Twitter feed pops this opinion piece from a musician writer.... Interesting reading.
Mark Coker looks at
the economics of Ebook lending library style.
Joanna Penn has an
interview with an expert on selling books into Germany. They have the biggest
population of readers in Europe.
Now for all those
great Craft Treats
These are the best
blog posts I’ve seen on plotting this week.
Other inspirational writing tips worthy of bookmarking
To Finish,
Two stellar opinion pieces.
On writing Y A from a literary writer... and what he learned, which was a heck of a lot!
Hugh Howey on the challenge of connecting with readers directly. You need to do it.
Here is my All Hallows treat for you...Writing tips fromGreat Authors.
Print out a couple of these and hang them over your desk!
maureen
This great pic was from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rattler97/
