It’s The Little Gifts

 In Publishing News this week,

The publishers are happy. It’s book gift buying season… but really, it’s because they won their court case against the Internet Archive. Publishing Perspectives writes that it all came about because of a missing certificate. (And if you work for Penguin Random House in the US they have just given everyone a pay rise.)

 

Scholastic is happy. They have sorted out a five nation Book Tour for Dav Pilkey. They anticipate bumper sales of his latest book, after all they printed 5 million copies. 

 

Authors and publishers who deal with Spotify had a nice surprise this week with Spotify rolling out lots of data about audiobooks on the site. You can figure out audience demographics and lots more with their new Spotify for Authors platform. 

 

While Spotify is gathering audiobook listeners, The UK Publishers Association thinks that there should be more money in the Audiobook sales pot. They suggest that the format sales along for the UK is closer to $1 Billion. Mark Williams looks at the numbers.

 

One of the popular gifts to teens from your government, if you live in Europe, is a Culture card which gives you quite a chunk of change to spend on cultural activities and books. French publishers are hanging on by their fingernails to their culture card in the face of government trying to claw back money from the scheme.

 

Spare a thought for the Mexican educational publishers… their industry has been hit with a 20% downturn in funding. Mark Williams looks at educational publishers and the problems of relying on fickle government handouts.

 

Do you wish you had a favourite book narrated by the author… it’s a shame they have shuffled off this mortal coil.* However, if you have a snippet of their recorded voice then you could be in business. GoodEReader explains how this will work. Hmm, I’m thinking of narration voice rights being a thing for literary estates.

 

Jane Friedman has a guest post from Nancy Wayson Dinan about the benefits of doing an MFA in writing. Nancy is a director of an MFA program. She looks at the MFA critically using Jane Friedmans quote ‘Art’s success on a commercial level versus on an artistic level.’ This is an interesting article on what the MFA teaches you and what it does not.

 

If you have been feeling that you need a break – check out Colleen Story’s article on managing the many baskets in your writing life to avoid writer overwhelm. This is a good post for those of us Down Under as we head into our Summer break.

 

Donald Maass has been teaching workshops and he stops for a moment to discuss emotional beats and human moments. An excellent teaching article.

 

In The Craft Section,

Character Secrets – Safeguarding- Angela Ackerman

Compelling tension and suspense in your story- Tiffany Yates Martin- Bookmark

How emotional shielding helps your characters- Becca Puglisi

How to mix dialogue and action- Janice Hardy-Bookmark

Inhabiting a name- Jeanne Kisacky- Bookmark

 

In The Marketing Section,

Promote your book with a roundup article- Sandra Beckwith

What you need to distribute into stores- Comprehensive- Joe Biel- Bookmark

What to do when the book launch is over- Alliance of Independent Authors - Bookmark

Starting and optimizing your website- Written Word Media

Universal Book Links with Bookfunnel- NEW – Bookmark

 

To Finish,

I’m sure Christmas is coming earlier every year. It doesn’t seem so long ago that it was Easter. The supermarkets have huge displays of Christmas food and conspicuous consumption is everywhere. So what to get for the writer in your life… or to drop hints about for yourself. Katie Weiland outlines her five gift rule for writers at Christmas. A package like this would make my Christmas.

 

Next week: I’m traveling to attend a family members Masters graduation, so there won’t be a blog post. When I get back it will be the bumper end of year roundup.  

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

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Pic: Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

 

*From the Bard himself. If his voice was ever recorded, few would understand it. 

Is It A Lemon?

 

In Publishing News this week,

 

The unleashing of the AI monsters have many in publishing concerned. Two stories caught my eye and left me feeling faintly sick. It was predicted but seeing these things blatantly promoted is confronting. 

A publishing startup/ tech company has decided to disrupt publishing (why?) by using AI to help edit, polish, and sell books. Spines reckon they could publish 8000 books a year with this model. If you give them $5000 you will get their personal attention. 

If you have $5000 – pay for a decent editor and cover and do it yourself.

Following on from this was the wonderful idea of taking out of print classics and getting AI to write new forwards and repackage them for sale. Slate has an in depth article exposing one Get Rich Quick scheme to teach you how to do this. This is problematic if you don’t check where the AI is scraping its content from. You could be breaching all sorts of copyright with university presses or believing the outright lies that AI likes to spin. (N.B. AI is not a super intelligent version of an encyclopedia which has been vetted for veracity.) 

Get Rich Quick publishing schemes have been around forever and using AI is just the latest twist of lemon in the publishing cocktail. Often these schemes are a front for a scam or are morally dubious. 

If you care about producing quality work with your name on it, stay away from them.

 

In audio publishing news, Spotify announced a deal with Bloomsbury. It looks like Spotify are approaching traditional publishers and gobbling up direct deals. Amazon has quickly moved to offer more audio choice. Spotify want to be all things audible… can Amazon compete with this? Mark Williams takes a look at the seismic shift happening with Spotify.

 

The New York University’s Advanced Publishing Institute 5 day conference is open for registration. If you have a spare $5000 you can attend in January. Publishing Perspectives has a quick overview of one of the talks that will be given by Penguin Random House on Shifting Consumer Tastes in Social Media. They hope to give tangible advice on this and other thorny problems to the attendees. For that amount of money it will have to be gold plated!

 

Publishers Weekly is releasing some of the talks from Frankfurt. This interesting article caught my eye by Ed Nawotka on the explosion of AI startups dedicated to the publishing industry.

 

If you follow Taylor Swift you might have heard that she has a book coming out based around her Era’s tour. If you are in publishing you might be surprised that she has not partnered with any publisher. She has the money and the clout and the fan base to be successful without a publisher backing her. However, not all celebrity books do well. The Atlantic looks at how she might upend the model and will there be room for a traditional publishing partnership down the trail.

 

The biggest author publishing conference happened in Las Vegas this month. Written Word Media put together a takeaways article about the trends and issues that were discussed at Vegas. Collaboration is King. 

Derek Murphy ( Creativ Indie) shares his slide show presentation and talks about Authentic Creativity As A Response To Artificial Intelligence.

Back in the day when Twitter was young and had no inkling of what a new owner might do, the publishing world flocked to the social media site. Then things changed. Publishing industry folks left for other pastures and it became harder to get back the tribe you used to have. Bluesky has spent the last week adding almost a million users a day and the publishing industry people started to flock together. Rachel Thompson takes a look at whether Bluesky will work for writers. 

 

Darcy Pattison has put together an excellent article on how to take a rights released book from Traditional Publishing and give it a whole new lease of life. Those books that didn’t get their series finished or didn’t find their audience don’t have to be consigned to the dustbin.

If you are struggling with NaNoWriMo this month you are not alone. Elinor Florence writes on Jane Friedman’s blog about how she got through the train wreck of her own NaNoWriMo project.  

In The Craft Section,

Going deeper with characterization- Lisa Hall Wilson- Bookmark

Balancing your cast of characters- September Fawkes

Don’t tie your story up in a neat bow- P J Parrish- Bookmark

How to write great dialogue- C S Lakin- Bookmark

What is your characters wounding event- Sue Coletta

 

In the Marketing Section,

Is your target readership meaningful to agents and publishers- Jane Friedman- Bookmark

5 essential steps to maximise your books success-Written Word Media- Bookmark

Social Media engagement- a how to from Hootsuite- Comprehensive

What to do when book sales start slipping- Thomas Umstattd- Bookmark

Turbocharging book sales with preorders- Mark Coker

 

To Finish

It’s Black Friday this week and there are deals galore for writers out there. You can check out Dave Chesson’s huge list of deals. 

If you are thinking about  Christmas/ Holiday gifts check out Sandra Beckwith’s big list of goodies designed for writers.

Infostack have their big bundle of writer resources on sale again.

Yes, It’s that time of the year already. The Credit Card Crunch!

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

Do you want the best of my bookmarked links in a handy monthly newsletter? You can subscribe here to join our happy band.

If you want the weekly blog in your inbox subscribe to the Substack version.

If you like the blog and want to buy me a coffee, I appreciate the virtual coffee love. Thanks.

 

Pic Photo by Tirza van Dijk on Unsplash