A trailer of Christmas presents...

Now we are in December, with the countdown to the end of school, I feel it is now time to look towards the Christmas busy season.

After all it is December...I was annoyed when I saw some shops putting up Christmas decorations in October....surely they could have waited or was the recession recovery (?) spurring them on to wring the dollars out of cash strapped pockets....

So Christmas....what does the busy author need at Christmas?

More time to write, Someone to look after the kids....food you don’t have to spend ages to prepare.... a holiday...A book contract or even two.....

As this is supposed to be an author marketing blog I will make you a present of a few links that have interested me this week.

Alan Rinzler has posted a great article on 9 tips for successful author readings. He covers tips and tricks to do a presentation successfully ...as ever, I love reading peoples responses to the posts because they can add so much more to the discussion...one commenter said she had a great response to her reading by putting a sign up in the mall carpark! Another said giving away chocolate always helps....

Staying with Alan, he recently examined the book trailer in an insightful post on their use in marketing books.

Alan has linked to The Book Trailer Blog which specialises in the nuts and bolts of book trailers....If you dare... scroll down and view the Sense and Sensibility and Sea monsters book trailer from the same person who brought you Jane Austen and Zombies...or skip it to see what Neil Gaiman is doing with book trailers...he is coming to the New Zealand International Arts Festival. I must must get my ticket for his event!

Zombies are everywhere...... Recently I was on the judging team for the Jack Lasenby Writing Award that we founded when I was convenor of the Wellington Children’s Book Association. (judges report on the blog.)
We had our biggest group to date this year with 149 entries ... and so many of them featured Zombies. However the winner didn’t. I had the pleasure of attending with Jack Lasenby and Louise Davies, our current convenor, the prize giving ceremony at Scots College, where we presented Raphael Kidman with his award and if you think the name is familiar you are right! Dame Fiona was there to witness her grandson’s success. We had five highly commended and two of these also received their certificates from Jack at Scots.

Tonight is the Wellington Children’s Book Association Christmas Quiz. We hold it at the Southern Cross pub in Wellington in the back room...If you are in Wellington tonight come along and test your knowledge of children’s books in a fun evening.

Yesterday I grabbed the NZ Listener for the big review on the must read children’s books of 2009 and wished that David Larsen had picked a few more Kiwi books...however almost all of Gecko Press' list made it into the top 50 and Maria Gill (Spinning Gold alumni) also made it with her super book on Rangitoto.

The judges for the New Zealand Post Children’s Book awards have been announced and they are Rosemary Tisdale, Trevor Agnew, and Ruth McIntyre....lots of Christmas reading for them all.

For those of you on Facebook the following video is for you.

Happy Advent
maureen

pic is from a book trailer website

Vanity Fair?

This week the big news in publishing is Harlequin. If you are a Harlequin author or know one then the amount of emails in your inbox this week about the future of publishing, Harlequin style, will probably have topped 500.

Every major blogger in the industry has commented on the situation and every one of them has had record comments wading into the fray. (Read Jane Friedman for an objective overview)

Harlequin is a HUGE publishing company. Last week it launched an e-publishing arm Carina Press.

One of the first of the big publishers to do so...showing they were forward thinking etc etc (Harlequin have always been innovative and the Romance authors are amongst the most business savvy writers you will ever meet.)

This week however Harlequin stuffed up. They launched Harlequin Horizons...their vanity publishing arm.

So if we are looking at purely business, they have the staff, they have the resources, why should they select the best manuscripts...why not just charge the writers fees to publish their book and split the royalties....

The backlash from the authors and writers associations has been huge with Harlequin changing their Harlequin Horizons website hourly and today abandoning it altogether for a different name. They are definitely trying to distance themselves from their vanity publishing mistake...unfortunately...the mud is sticking.

If your manuscript gets rejected by Harlequins regular imprint you have the chance to still get published provided you pay for everything up front.

Now if you self publish you are in total control of the whole process. You own everything.

If you vanity publish, someone else takes control over the process because you don’t have the time or the will to do it yourself. You pay all the bills but you don’t fully own the finished product as the publisher takes a cut of the royalties.

So if your book takes off (a rare thing with vanity publishing as the publisher has no incentive to market your book because they have already been paid their fee upfront, so it’s all down to author marketing making the difference) the vanity publisher then takes the credit and a chunk of the royalties...and you paid all the bills....

You have to go into this with your eyes wide open and that is the Harlequin authors concern, along with the devaluing of the Harlequin brand. (After all they have standards don’t they?)

The authors (and agents) are right to be mad...(actually mad is rather mild for what is happening out there.)

At the beginning of this week Harlequins new imprint Horizons was promising that the books would look the same and be bought everywhere that you could buy a Harlequin book. There would be no difference... now they are trying to drop Harlequin altogether from the imprint...aware that they have blundered.

And while everyone is feeling sorry for the Harlequin writers out there...the Christian writers got caught as well in the same sort of horror story....who will be next?

maureen

pic is a pair of vanity shoes......you could kick with them, throw them, see if they fit, choose one over the other...lots of associations with the post...