Being Mad Helps

This week has been financial reporting week for some of the big publishers. Oh the tangled web of eBooks and Print Books. Is one cannibalizing the other? Pundits pored over the statistics. The Financial Review looked at the state of the publishing industry.

Mike Shatzkin has a brilliant post on the state of play with publishers still sticking to their plan of high eBook prices. Mike shows why he thinks this is a short sighted idea. The comments on this article were fast and fascinating with people discussing buying habits. Do you wait for a sale or buy an $11.99 eBook?

Gladdening the heart of Publishing warriors everywhere was the nice little snapshot of Author Earnings ISBN acquisitions. They are in decline. So was this why PRH cut them loose?

How often do you write what you want to write? How often does your editor get cold feet or ask you to tone it down. Or you get cold feet and tone it down first. This week K.C Alexander took over Chuck’s blog to talk about how she was tired of having her characters toned down, as not fitting a perceived feminine model... and things were about to change. This is an excellent post on courage and truth to your writing.

Kris Kathryn Rusch has been putting together an anthology of the early women writers in SFF. She explains how she came to be involved in the project. It all stemmed from being told that women were discriminated against in Science Fiction. Women of a certain age are ignored and their work disappears... so what do you do. You get MAD and then you become a force...

Kris was about to post the last article in her Dealbreakers series when she heard about the demand by Hachette for the advance back from Seth Grahame-Smith over the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies series. It’s big money and the contract is murky. This is a must read post as Kris explains. The contract is available to read and it is scary. The author was not the most important party in this contract. They weren’t even second...

In The Craft Section,

How to create tension in your writing- Now Novel- Bookmark

Writing great loglines

Opening your story- What you need to know- Janice Hardy- Bookmark

Using contractions in dialogue- K M Weiland- Bookmark

How to create strong character arcs- Sean Platt and Jonny B Truant- Bookmark

Avoiding book publishing blunders – The Book Designer- A great all round article!

Writing setting descriptions – James Scott Bell – Bookmark

A great collection of articles on Revision- Kidlit411

In The Marketing Section,

How are you connecting with your customers?

Book Marketing – The Good The Bad and The Ugly

10 tips to get book reviews- Anne R Allen- Bookmark

How authors can work together to promote- Janice Hardy- Bookmark

Don’t make these website mistakes

101 Book Marketing ideas

7 ways Non Fiction authors can be newsworthy- Nina Amir

How to make a fascinating Amazon Book Listing

How to make successful use of your author platform- Rachel Thompson - Bookmark

To Finish,

LitHub is an interesting website that publishes long form interviews and articles. Today they published an article on Nan Talese, an editor with her own imprint at Knopf Doubleday. It is a fascinating look through her life in publishing from editing Hemingway to working with Simon Tolkein.  

You have to be a little bit mad and passionate to write and work in publishing.

Maureen

@craicer

Pic: Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931)

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Dining Out

This week Barnes and Noble announced that they were going to mix it up in the bookselling trade by introducing four concept stores with restaurants. So you can now go out to dinner at a bookshop. For some of us that would be perfectly fine. I am reminded of a wonderful bookseller, in Wellington, who  reminds us at every book launch that wine and books are a great mix but not wine on books. Mike Shatzkin takes a look at this new idea and points out the flaws in their planning. As a publishing futurist he predicts some interesting changes in the bookselling model.

Digital Book Worlds conference next year has morphed into a four track extravaganza. Each strand is being designed by a separate expert. That’s four mini conferences in one. It looks like an interesting line up. (Having programmed multi track conferences myself it looks like a lot of work!) The NZSA has a writers forum weekend coming up. The programme highlights look very familiar. (Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.)

Staying with Digital Book World... They have an interesting article on audiobooks. Authors can you afford to produce an audiobook? This goes into the nuts and bolts. As always I recommend you read the comments because then you get so much more information.

If you like filling your ears with interesting content then check out the SPA Girls podcast. These romance writers host a 30 minute podcast every week on Self Publishing. They recently attended NZRWA and talk about what it was like learning from screenwriting guru Michael Hauge.

In the recent Edinburgh Book Festival there was anger at the tone of a debate on YA Books with one author saying that 90% of YA is crap. The Guardian picked up on it and explored the arguments supporting and defendingYA.

Garry Rogers has an interesting blog for writers who want to get their crime details right. He recently decided to ask his best selling guests about the tipping point in their respective careers. This is a fascinating series of mini interviews.

Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi are about to celebrate their first anniversary of One Stop For Writers. So of course they have some interesting new features to come. They have just introduced scene mapping and world building tools.

In The Craft Section,

Creating memorable characters- Anne R Allen- Bookmark

Character detail – James Scott Bell - Bookmark

A lesson in dialogue- Jennie Nash on The Book Designer-Bookmark

Adding depth to the story- Kassandra Lamb

1 mistake that writers make – Stephen Pressfield

Do you share your WIP- Jami Gold- Bookmark

Writing in Busy Times- Elizabeth S Craig

On Editing- Great article from Writer Unboxed

Revising Query letters- Query Shark-Bookmark

Moving beyond hair colour – Jody Hedlund

20 ideas for inspiration – C S Lakin

In The Marketing Section,

Social media marketing does work- Roz Morris

10 Social Media Applications for Writers

Two interesting articles from Joanna Penn. Breakdown of BookSales- an up close look at her last year of sales and Two million books - an interview with a best selling crime writer.

How to use ARC copies for promotion- Bookmark

ISBN’s everything you need to know – Bookwork – (NB if you are in NZ you can get free ISBN’s 

from National Library)

Using Pinterest for branding- Rachel Thompson-Bookmark

Pitching on Twitter- Bookmark

5 apps to boost Book Marketing- Frances Caballo-Bookmark

To Finish,

Jane Friedman has an interesting interview with Sage Cohen about her new book Fierce On The Page. Sage has some great thoughts on giving yourself permission to write and what a fierce writer really means.

It’s nearly time for sending out my next newsletter where I share the best of my links from the last month and other interesting thoughts. Why don’t you subscribe and catch up on some good reading.

Maureen Crisp

@craicer

Pic from Flickr/ Creative Commons/ Graham Maclean