The All You Can Eat Buffet

In the publishing blogosphere this week...

Mark Coker had an interesting article in Publishers Weekly about the commodification of books and how publishers must fight the dragging down of book prices.

Patreon has changed the way artists get paid. It is crowdsourcing funding directly to the artist, like the art patrons of old. Patreon has increased its fees but not by much. They have some other irons in the fire that will be interesting for artists.

The EU has passed new copyright rules. Essentially you now have to vouch for all the content on your website. Academics have not been happy with the proposed law with many signing open letters of complaint that it will hurt authors.

Apple is getting into subscription-based content starting with the news. They had their big announcement this week. The question is are they going to take on the Zon subscription service and extend it to books...

Writers can suffer from extreme loneliness. Stuck in a room all day crouched over a computer never seeing the sun... The Guardian recently had an article looking at the home office work lifestyle and made some practical suggestions for a healthy balance.

Jane Friedman recently had a guest post with four Kidslit authors who related their experiences of straddling a trad published and indie published life. Go in with your eyes open.

Staying with Kidlit. Mary Kole has an interesting article on how to get literary themes into your writing for children.

Kris Rusch has an excellent post on grammar. Kris explains how your use of punctuation directly feeds into your author voice. This is a fascinating deep dive into just what constitutes author voice.

Middle Grade Ninja has a great post on how to write fantasy quickly and Anne R Allen has a fabulous post on using Mary Sue’s or Gary Stu’s. If you don’t know what either of these terms mean you MUST read the post. Your readers will thank you.

In The Craft Section,
4 pacing tricks- K M Weiland- Bookmark

6 mistakes that can kill a great plot- Mythcreants- Bookmark

British vs American English- dictionary- Bookmark

When should I enter or exit a scene- Seth Myers- 

Creating Compelling Cadence- Writersinthestorm- Bookmark


In The Marketing Section,
Using video marketing- Frances Caballo

Using exclusive content to market- Bookfunnel- Bookmark

Using map artists- Alli blog

13 copywriting tips to help write a better novel- Writers Digest

Self Publishing Formula podcast- The necessity of mailing lists- Excellent show!

To Finish,
Janice Hardy has rounded up all the story archetypes in one big master plot article. This is where you decide if you are writing a quest plot with a revenge motif using a golden fleece style adventure. If you have been wondering about where your story fits read this. 

Maureen 
@craicer

Yes, I’m really late with my monthly newsletter. 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. I promise I will get it done soon because I want to share some interesting projects with you. If you want to shout me a coffee hit the button up top. Thanks 

Pic: Flickr Creative Commons - A canvas of Light

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.)