What is your goal?

Around the publishing blogosphere this week...
What is the biggest threat to the print industry at the moment? Ho hum you think... another article about digital or audiobooks... NO. The lack of paper for printing is starting to make itself felt.  Publisher's Weekly reports that at the recent BISG conference, it was the number one topic.

Somebody hasn’t told Wattpad that there is a shortage of paper... They are steaming ahead with their print publishing arm. Their first offerings are off to a great start after being chosen by an AI.

Amazon this week trumpeted that you could contact them and talk to a human... They meant Alexa... who isn’t human. However, this raised an interesting point. What happens to copyright if an AI writes the book? Passive Guy took a look at what’s happening in the music world with AI scores.

If you have parted ways with your agent, how much should you disclose about the relationship to another agent? Bookends Literary talks about agent baggage.

Meanwhile, in the print distribution business... the only US competitor for Ingram has just thrown in the towel with their retail wholesale division. The industry pushed back when Ingram wanted to buy Barker &Taylor last year, because of the power one distributor would have in the marketplace. Who is laughing now? Not the publishers.

If you are wondering how Bookstores are doing this year check out this comprehensive article by Nancy Herther for Against The Grain- a blog site for bookstores, libraries, and publishers. If indie bookstores are struggling why is Amazon opening up more bricks and mortar stores? Are Indie bookstores really taking a hit? 

Every time I turn around Streelib seems to be doing something interesting... (Hmmm their  goal could be world domination outside the US/ UK.) They are getting into Apps. Their press release this week announced they had partnered with Stary which has over one million users in the 10 months it’s been operating. Stary is just like Wattpad and we know what happened there... 

Jami Gold has a great article on The Power of Character Arcs. If you were one of the many who saw Endgame this week. This discussion on drive and focus is the article for you. (There are no spoilers.)

In The Craft Section,

Making a big revision- Jami Gold- Bookmark

How to treat your setting like a character- Kyle Massa- Bookmark

7 tips to make your monsters meaty

Stay on target - Janice Hardy

7 thoughts about collaboration- Dan Brotzel- Bookmark

In The Marketing Section,

How to reduce marketing anxiety- Booklife

Author publicity for the camera shy- Bookworks- Bookmark


Ten reasons to run your writing like a business- Leigh Shulman- Bookmark

An informal guide to understanding facebook ad jargon- Digitalgal

No one is born famous- Penny Sansevieri

How to write effective facebook sponsored posts- Social Media Examiner- Bookmark 

To Finish,

Kristine Rusch has a very interesting post on goal setting this week. How often do you set little goals? This is a mindset shift which may end up changing your work life completely. My To Do list has To Do Lists on it... I’m off to break it all up.

Maureen
@craicer

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Pic; Flickr Creative Commons - Jesper Sehested and PlusLexia.com The PlusLexia team inspire Dyslexics by finding stories of success from people with Dyslexia. Way To Go Jesper!

Literary Citizens - Thinking Beyond Borders

This has been a terrible week. 
For my international readers, NZ had a terrorist attack perpetrated by a white supremacist from another country. 50 citizens and visitors to our country were killed along with 50 wounded. For a country of nearly 5 million people, with about 2 degrees of separation, the scale of the tragedy is like 4000 people killed in the United States of America. Today our government made it illegal to own a semi-automatic military-style weapon or magazine, effective immediately.

As a nation, we have been forced to look at ourselves in the mirror. Could we have done more to call out hate speech and racism? As we all reflect on some harsh truths, our leaders have been quick to act, to demand that we not say the name of the attacker or anything he espoused. To make funds available for flights and funeral costs to victims families. To extend visas to people caught up in the tragedy of Christchurch. As messages poured in from around the world we were reminded that the world is smaller due to Social Media. 

Social Media brought out the best of our global citizenry with donations, food, flights, and vigils all being quickly organised. But Social Media companies were shown to be the worst global citizens when they failed to stop the hate message video that was live streamed by the terrorist despite trumpeting how good they were at policing their sites.
Many NZ companies have withdrawn advertising from the big social media accounts who failed us on Friday. Many Kiwi’s are closing their FB accounts disgusted with the non-appearance of Mark Zuckerberg to explain why FB failed to stop the video being shared around the world. 

I have been thinking about Global Citizenry a lot this week. In the publishing blogosphere, we can become very Western focussed in our publishing thinking. There is a huge market of readers out there in the rest of the world. I follow The New Publishing Standard and Mark Williams, the editor, recently got in touch to comment on my blog post of two weeks ago with some updated figures which he graciously said I could put in todays blog post.

"In fact our StreetLib author & publisher portal roll-out is at 75 countries this week and will top 100 in April. We hope to have the entire world enfranchised with a publishing portal later this year.’ 
(The underline is mine.) Mark went on to add...

"Globally there are over 4 billion people online but only 11% of them are in the US and UK. The global book market is worth over $143 billion and 70% of that is outside the USA. The global book markets are incredibly exciting right now, and growing fast. By one estimate that $143 billion valuation for 2017 could be $356 billion by 2022.

Globally TNPS tracked over 50 million people attending book fairs last year outside the US/UK, and came nowhere near covering all.

This past week the Big Bad Wolf book sale ended in Jakarta, Indonesia. It's the world's biggest book sale. 5.5 million books on sale 24/7 for eleven days. I don't have this year's final numbers yet but in 2018 750,000 visitors crammed in to buy books. 4.5 million of those 5.5 million books were in English. Such was the demand that BBW had to make two more trips to Indonesia in 2018.
Big Bad Wolf last year shipped over 30 million English language books to countries like Thailand, Sri  Lanka, Taiwan, Dubai, Indonesia, Philippines and this year is aiming at 60 million. Earlier this year BBW took 1 million English-language books to Myanmar (Burma)."

Mark sent me many more facts and figures and they make eye-popping reading. But to give you a hint check out one of his latest articles on what Streelib is doing in Africa.

For those people wondering about where Big Bad Wolf sources their books... they are remaindered copies onsold by the publisher. If you are a Trad published writer this will leave a bitter taste in your mouth as authors receive no money for remaindered books. 

As I am a children’s book writer I’m always interested in what trends are on the watch list at Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy. 

Jane Friedman has an interesting post on Beta Readers. They come in all shapes and sizes.

In The Craft Section,

Writing the first draft- Go Into The Story

Goal oriented storytelling- Chris Winkle- Bookmark

Pet the dog signpost scene- DIYMFA- Bookmark

Finding the perfect title for your book- Alli Blog- Bookmark

Coming up with Scene ideas

In The Marketing Section,

Book Marketing assets and processes- Orna Ross

4 Facebook ad techniques- Luke Heinecke

Book sales description- Joanna Penn- Bookmark

Successful Self-publishing- Creatif writing- Bookmark

Social Media Hashtags for Authors

A few things to know about blurbs- Pub Crawl

To Finish,

Michael Seidlinger from Melville House wrote in a blog post this week about literary citizenship and giving back to the literary community. One of our exemplary literary citizens is Joanna Penn. She has just celebrated ten years of podcasting. This is a phenomenal achievement. Her anniversary podcast is great listening and she announces that she is adding a new podcast on The Creative Penn on books and travel. Congratulations Joanna!! 

Maureen
@craicer

In my monthly newsletter, due this weekend,  I round up the best of the bookmarked craft and marketing links as well as some other bits and pieces. When you subscribe you will also get a nifty book crammed full with marketing notes. If you want to shout me a coffee hit the Kofi button up top. Thanks. I appreciate virtual coffee love.

Pic: The NZ iconic silver fern, which is a real plant, was redrawn this week by Pat Cambell in the Canberra Times as Muslims going to prayer. (Heart Broken.)

Whose attitude is right?

Around the publishing blogosphere...

This week was unsettling on Social Media. First there was the big Twitter pile on

about a forthcoming book from Young Adult writer, Amelie Wen Zhao.

Amelie was about to publish her debut novel. As authors do, she drew on her upbringing

and culture from her own country. She has a 3 book deal with a traditional publisher in the USA.

She was forced to ask for a delay in publication due to the backlash on social media

about content in her book.

From what I could see as the Twitter rage grew… many commenting had not read advance copies so did not know the context but raged about it anyway. Many immediately took the author to task for seeming to use American historical events badly in her fantasy.

For writers from other countries watching this rage fest unfold on Twitter it was deeply unsettling. The rest of the world has stories to tell of slavery, human trafficking happening now or in the past. Other cultures experiences of this is just as valid to use as a basis for a fantasy book. Do we always have to use and be mindful of the same western viewpoints in an age where stories are shared globally with the click of a button?

While writers and commentators were getting steamed up over a fantasy book,

publishers and agents were getting spooked by the story broken in

The New Yorker of a prominent writer and editor who seemed to have based

all his credentials on a fantasy life. As the events in his fantasy life were exposed

it read like the famous novel The Talented Mr Ripley. The writer/editor had relationships

everywhere and there will be many people in publishing feeling they have been

the townspeople in The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Another big story this week was the subscription service

Scribd passing 1 million subscribers. Publishers have been flirting with subscription

services for a while. Amazon has what could be the world’s biggest with Kindle Unlimited

based mainly in the USA but that leaves Scribd with the rest of the world…

and they have lots of plans for growth.

Another publisher with global ambitions has just opened publishing portals in another

21 countries over 6 continents.

Italian based Streetlib seeks to publish everywhere that has an internet connection,

in any language, in any format.

If you are a writer in Lesotho or Nandi, writing in your own language…

Streetlib is for you. Among the new countries just enrolled in their publishing

portal are Fiji, Australia and New Zealand.    

Amazon is looking at the rest of the world and thinking hmm great kids books in

other languages- they need us. They are opening up their Amazon kids publishing

arm to translations.

Meanwhile Google is contracting- with Google Plus set to disappear by April.

And so we come to Kris Rusch’s last blog post looking at the changes for publishing this year.

It has been an fascinating series. If you haven’t been reading her posts you are missing out
on learning about this industry. Last week’s post is a must read!

This week Kris talks about the attitude change in publishing.

In The Craft Section,

Writing a single POV story - K M Weiland

5 ways to turn off your inner editor - Janice Hardy- Bookmark

6 ways to show emotion for non POV characters- Becca Puglisi- Bookmark

What is your protagonist object of desire- Bookmark

Writing skill you should cultivate- Jerry Jenkins

In The Marketing Section,

3 principles of selling rights- Orna Ross- Bookmark

Discoverability and Going Wide- The Book Designer

Social Media tips for the introverted writer- Ella Barnard-Bookmark

How can I get more subscribers- Indies Unlimited

Distribution for the indie author- Alli Blog

Smart author advertising strategies - Penny Sansevieri - Bookmark

To Finish,

We are living through major changes in our climate and our perceptions

and understandings of our place in a global village.

The internet has opened up the democratisation of information across the world.

For the author having an online presence is essential. Careful curation

of your digital presence is important.

Anne R Allen takes a good look at mistakes that authors have made in

their online presence and how to fix them.

Remember that gossip is not restricted to your own village now,

it can spread throughout the world with a click of a button.

Maureen
@craicer

In my monthly newsletter, coming soon, I round up the best of the bookmarked craft and marketing links as well as some other bits and pieces. When you subscribe you will also get a nifty book crammed full with marketing notes. If you like the blog and want to shout me a coffee- hit the coffee button up top. Thanks.

Pic : Flickr Creative Commons Guilhem Vellut