Month: August 2011

What’s the Difference Between an IP Lawyer and a Contracts Lawyer? Why Does an Author Care?

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This post, by Passive Guy, originally appeared on his The Passive Voice on 8/23/11.

Passive Guy thanks all who wished him well in his new endeavor both in comments and in emails. This encouragement is very much appreciated.

One emailer requested that PG describe the difference between an IP Lawyer and a Contracts Lawyer. PG has described himself as an attorney who works with contracts or a contract counsel.

IP is short for Intellectual Property. In the United States, there are four broad classes of intellectual property:

  1. Patents
  2. Trademarks
  3. Trade Secrets
  4. Copyrights

Patents involve the majority of IP lawyers. A patent attorney is not only licensed by his/her state bar, but is also licensed to practice before the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO).

With a few exceptions, only attorneys who have an undergraduate degree in a scientific or technology discipline – engineering, chemistry, pharmacology, physics, etc., etc. – are permitted to become patent attorneys. In addition to having the requisite educational background, a patent attorney must also take and pass a separate patent bar exam.

Being licensed to practice before the USPTO allows an attorney to file and prosecute patent applications for inventors. An attorney without this qualification may not represent an inventor in USPTO proceedings.

Patent litigation is another story. No special patent bar admission is required to litigate the validity of patents in federal court. Some patent litigation attorneys are patent lawyers and others are not. The expertise necessary to prosecute a patent application is much different than the expertise necessary to try a case before a jury.

The owner of a patent has the right to prevent others from making, selling, etc., anything that is described in the claims of the patent.

The reason patent law involves the most IP attorneys is that it’s a lucrative specialty. Recently, Google announced an agreement to acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. It was reported that Google’s principal reason for making the purchase was to gain ownership of Motorola’s portfolio of approximately 17,500 patents.

The other three broad areas of IP law involve much smaller groups of specialized attorneys. Neither Trademark nor Copyright law require any special educational credentials or separate bar admission.

A trademark is a symbol, word, or words legally registered or established by use as representing a company or product. Trademarks are everywhere. When you see a ® or a ™ next to a company or product name, you’re looking at a trademark. When you see a ℠, you’re looking at a service mark, which is a type of trademark that applies to services, not products.

Read the rest of the post on The Passive Voice.

The Collapse Of Complex Narratives

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This post, by Luke Bergeron, originally appeared on his mispeled site on 11/2/10.

Clay Shirky turned me on to “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter. I’ve been reading it for a number of weeks, whenever I feel in the mood to mentally tackle the subject matter.

In a nutshell, the book’s thesis is basically this: In order to solve problems, societies must add complexity. Complexity is a valid method for solving problems, but increasing complexity comes with increasing energy needs.

Once a society is no longer able to sustain the energy costs of its level of complexity (i.e. when it reaches the unsustainable end of an unsustainable model) the society collapses. Tainter provides many examples of this model in previous societies including the Roman Empire. Specifically, he claims Rome collapsed because the level of energy and capital needed to maintain the empire was solved by the continual conquering of external societies. Once there was nothing close to conquer to acquire easy resources, the society became unsustainable and collapsed.

The idea the book presents fascinates me for several reasons, because the idea seems to easily extend itself into all complexities that could aptly named societies: personalities, gadgets, markets, businesses, and even our own current struggle with oil and energy in America. But the aspect that fascinates me most, as a writer, is narrative.

In this post I’d like to talk about the narrative as a society and see if it’s possible to apply Tainter’s ideas to building a functional narrative. I’d like to examine the idea of writerly resources, and also see if there are any lessons we can glean.

Why You Should Bother Reading This

But first, I’d like to get the “why” out of the way. (Feel free to skip to the next heading if the overzealous “why” doesn’t interest you.) Why apply Tainter’s ideas to an aspect of human creation that he did not intend? I absolutely loathe the tendency in literary theory to apply, with seeming random chance, the ideas of one thinker to a system of ideas for which those ideas were not intended.

There are so many dreadful examples of this type of thing in literary theory that I can’t even begin to address them all, but, in case you don’t know what I mean, the most egregious have titles like “A Marxist Application of Capital in Examination of Dr. Suess’ The Snetches” and “Horton Hears a Who: An Neo-ecological Critique in Seventeen Parts” and “The Lorax Versus Gwendolyn Brooks: A Jungian Microbattle” and so on. Obviously, these are all fictitious examples, but you surely understand the concept.

The problem with these types of analyses is twofold:  one – these types of articles are based on the understood premise that one must publish to gain and retain university tenure and one of the easiest ways to do this is by applying whatever thinker’s ideas happen to be in vogue at the moment to whatever fiction or nonfiction also happens to be in vogue at the moment, with the understanding that the combination of the two must not have been broached before. Of course, since the spread of the vogue is tumultuous, one is never short of topics. Whether this is a valid juxtaposition (aside from its use to build a career out of gibberish) is never considered.

Two, as an extension of one: these types of articles do nothing to extend human understanding of epistemology, literature, or anything else useful – they only do what they are intended to do, which it is to create a vortex of verbose verbiage so devastatingly complex so as to shame university colleagues to admit they had neither the time, interest, or capacity to delve into its dark, demonic depths to attempt to understand it, and will be happy thus far, to extend tenure if only, please, would the Professor kindly leave the room and never speak of the broken artifice of the system again. Or, at the very least, if it must be spoken of, maintain that the system is both a healthy and valid method for determining suitability for a teaching position at a place of higher learning and the apt self-aggrandizing pat on the backside in front of lesser-published colleagues.

So, why, then, knowing all that, must I persist in this seemingly random application of Tainter’s ideas to narrative structure if I’m not pursuing tenure and know that this post will be overlooked by 99.7% of the reader’s of this site because it also seems a dark, demonic vortex of verbose verbiage? To that I answer, with a bipartite bellow: “Screw you, you dissenting curmudgeons!” and “Well, I’m interested – please feel free to regard this as a type of mental masturbation in the worst possible way.”

But in all seriousness, I’m writing this because I believe there is actual gold to be mined here. There are lessons to learn and time to be stolen from writing fiction. And I am no one if I am not a writer who enjoys analysis, lesson learning, patronizing talk, and procrastination. So onward and upwards!

Narrative as a Society

 

Read the rest of the post on Luke Bergeron‘s mispeled.

Why Your Blog's "About" Page Matters

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It’s amazing how often this happens: I visit an author blog and, finding something interesting, I go looking for the “About” page. And when I get there, it’s a total disappointment.

Typically there will be a couple of paragraphs of copy and a photo, but often there’s not even that. For some reason the Blogger.com platform seems particularly guilty in providing little in the way of an “About” page.

But even when authors have an about page, it falls victim to one of two problems:

  • Boring. Do you want to read about where I went to college? No, I didn’t think so, since there’s no benefit in it to you, one way or another.
  • Written like a press release. Writing about yourself in the third person can be awkward, and it’s easy to slip into “corporate-speak” when we try.

The Goal of the “About” Page

I think if you look at your analytics you’ll find that your “About” page is one of the more popular sites on your blog.

All of us want to connect to the person behind the words, that’s just a natural human desire. It pays to recognize this because it’s an important signal.

When I visit an “About” page I’m open to more engagement with the author. I’m saying with my clicks and my time that I’m interested in you. Since a lot of what we’re trying to do with our blogs is build reader engagement, you can see why your “About” page is actually a crucial and uniquely powerful asset in that effort.

Understanding this makes it more clear how to fashion your own “About” page.

Your aim is to humanize yourself, step out from behind the author’s viewpoint and engage with readers directly.

It makes no sense to waste this precious communication time with information that has no interest to anyone outside your immediate family.

“They want to see the face behind the blog. People use your About page to decide if they’ll subscribe or not. Ideally, you’ll want to let them know that you know what you’re talking about. Readers also like to be assured you’re human. Assure them.”—Martyn Chamberlin, Copyblogger

 

Statistics Tell the Story

A look at Google Analytics tells the story of why we need to pay attention to the “About” Page. On this blog, over the last 30 days there were 370 visits to my main “About” page. When I was working through a course in blogging I put a fair amount of work into getting this page to work.

I have a secondary “About” page, my “Hire Me” page that performs a similar function. It got 523 visits over the same period.

Multiplied out for the year, it looks like this:

“About Joel” page = 370 x 12 = 4,440 visits
“Hire Me” page = 523 x 12 = 6,276 visits

That’s over 10,000 people who will click over to my “About” pages in the next year. I want to use that opportunity to my advantage, and that’s something you can do, too.

Check your “About” page to see if it:

  • Communicates in a personal way to readers
  • Contains information readers of your site would fine relevant or interesting
  • Shows more sides of you than you usually show in your articles
  • Uses photographs or videos to make the information more personal
  • Links to other assets of yours or to contact information.

Some Examples

Chris Brogan has an excellent “About” page which speaks in a very personal voice but still manages to list lots of impressive achievements.

Colleen Wainwright shows another way to connect with readers while providing lots of background at the same time.

Joanna Penn does a great job of personalizing her “About” page while reinforcing the mission of her blog.

Paul Stamatiou shows how you can make an “About” page both interesting and informative.

I hope this encourages you to take a fresh look at your “About” page as another way to build reader engagement. Your readers will thank you if you do.

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Self-Publishing: How You Can Learn And Improve

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Those who say that self-publishing is a vast world of bad quality writing, are right… still right. They do not take into account the fact that self-publishers learn and improve.

Self-published authors, those who think seriously about their writing, are highly motivated to find answers to their failures or successes, are willing to analyze and receive feedback. All that to write, publish and promote a better next book.

The beauty of the Internet is that they can find almost everything here. They have the same access to knowledge, resources and tools as big publishers.

Many of the tools were already mentioned in this series. Let’s say, the author is using Bite-Size Edits. He can observe, bite by bite, how his text is being edited and improved. Or after testing a couple of self-publishing platforms he decided to focus on two of them. Or he learns that the best way to communicate with readers is podcasting.

Internet is the biggest self-improving system on earth. Users are learning from each other – from comments, number of likes or favorites, number of retweets, you name it. Every such micro-fact can be, and usually is, analysed. And self-publishers have tools to make the analysis more accurate.

Let’s start from book statistics functionality. The biggest and most advanced platforms offer different ways and levels of analyzing how the book is doing. You can then match it with your online activity and locate the effort which gave best results.

One of the best analytics is provided by Feedbooks. It shows not only a number of downloads and favorites. What is tremendously useful is the split into different file formats, clients (apps, browsers) and countries. You can see how many of your readers are using mobile devices with Android operating system or how many of them are downloading your book directly to a computer. This can help you intensify your communication to the most promising group of readers.

Feedbooks stats

Analytics dashboard at Feedbooks

If you promote your book heavily on social media, you can use tools to measure the effectiveness of your activity. The most common and advanced one is Bit.ly. It’s a URL shortening tool with an extended statistics functionality. You can check the influence of every link you share: the number of clicks, tweets, Facebook shares, likes and comments.

The basic way to use Bit.ly is to check the impact of the message associating the link. Send two tweets to your book page – each time with a different text. You’ll see which one is more convincing.

Another great tool to consider is Hootsuite. It’s a Twitter client with many powerful features. Among many options, you can compare traffic to your blog (Google Analytics) with your Twitter activity. Other Twitter based analytics tools are Klout, TweetReach, BackTweets and TweetStats.

If you liked this article, please share it with your friends. Get free updates by e-mail or RSS, powered by FeedBurner. Let’s meet on Twitter and Facebook. Check also my geek fiction stories: Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed.


This is a reprint from Piotr Kowalczyk‘s Password Incorrect.

Selling Ebooks – How Indie Booksellers Can Compete

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As a Smashwords ebook author and publisher and an independent bookstore owner, I have been concerned about the direction ebooks are taking us. At times I have been feeling like I was running a buggy whip  business while folks down the street had started to sell gasoline. How could I compete?

That has been the quandary for many independent bookstores. If they didn’t have a very expensive website with the American Booksellers Association on their IndieBound.com system, they had no access to sell ebooks to their customers. That has changed with the advent of book distributor Baker & Taylor’s new service for independent bookstores who use them as their primary first-choice for book orders.

If you go to https://thebookbarn.mybooksandmore.com/MBM/screens/products/general/general.jsp you will find a landing page similar to what you would find at Amazon, but easier to navigate. Halfway down the page you will find:

This will take you to an information page and also allow you to download an e-reader app onto your computer. When looking for books on the site’s search engine, if there is an ebook version available, it will show up along with the hardback version, the various audio versions, the reinforced library version, the trade paperback, and the mass market paperback. If you want the ebook, click on it to go into the shopping cart. It will give you a choice of formats. The rest is business as usual. Notice that we have built automatic discounts into what we offer through our site on Baker & Taylor. Oh, BTW, if you need to rent textbooks, click on that tab and perform your search. Once found, that goes into either the shopping cart or the rental cart, depending.

In addition to the ebooks for fees selections, you can also peruse GoogleBooks for their thousands of free open-source materials. I’ve downloaded eight free ebooks about Buffalo Bill Cody and Leavenworth’s history that I can use for research material in support of my historical performer gigs. These were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s and are no longer protected by copyright.

In all, this really levels the playing field for us. Anything bought through this site goes toward our bookstore’s account. In other words, we get our share. Now we have the ability to sell in two markets we’ve always wanted and didn’t have the ability to do so. This may prove the salvation of mom & pop stores like ours. We’re really grateful Baker & Taylor recognized the need and came up with a solution in which everybody wins.

 

This is a reprint from Bob’s Spear‘s Book Trends.

The Day Digital Died

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This post, by Evan Schnittman, originally appeared on his Black Plastic Glasses blog on 8/1/11.

It was a seemingly innocuous situation… I was sitting in a room filled with publishing types: book publishers, librarians, agents, industry press, metadata specialists, and consultants of varying shapes and sizes. We were there in an advisory role to one of the digital publishing conferences.

Things started innocently enough – the usual suspects began to chime in (I am shamelessly unable NOT to talk in a group). As I spoke I began to feel a strong sense of familiarity. And that feeling grew and grew as the conversation rolled forward until I felt I was having a deja vu on steroids moment. It dawned on me that I was in the exact same discussion about the exact same conference in the exact same room as I was last year. And you know what – it wasn’t déjà vu, it was reality.

We were having the same discussion because we were talking about digital as if it were a new way of thinking, publishing, selling, etc. We were circling the carcass of a topic that had been discussed ad infinitum – because it was all speculation and postulation. And nothing is better fodder for discursive debate than speculation and postulation!

At that moment I realized the world of publishing is now so thoroughly changed by digital, that digital is no longer a discrete topic/subtopic/theme/raison d’etre. Digital has ceased to be an independent, stand-alone, separate entity; digital is now blended into the very fabric of the entire publishing business.

And so, as we sat and attempted to determine the topics of a conference that would be presented to hundreds of participants and thousands more via broadcast and Twitter, we became stuck on what was possible and practical to discuss.


Read the rest of the post on Evan Schnittman‘s Black Plastic Glasses.

The Joy Of Giving Away Ebooks

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Four years ago this month we moved into our current house, and I was gearing up to launch my first novel. I had never heard of Kindle, and e-books were only a vague concept. My biggest concern was getting print copies in the mail to three major reviewers three months before the release date.

Today I’ll upload my eighth novel to Kindle, and my biggest concern is getting ebook copies to hundreds of reviewers. For me, in this new world of publishing, one of the best things about being an independent author is the ability to give away as many copies of my novels as I want, with no financial cost and very little time. One of the concomitant changes is the willingness of reviewers to read e-books.(Not Publishers Weekly, of course, but they aren’t going to review me anyway.)

For an upcoming author, this is a game changer. Giving my new novel to readers and reviewers who haven’t tried my work is the best promotion I can do. If they like it, they’ll blog about the novel, post reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and hopefully tell their friends or book club members. I have the potential to reach thousands of new readers in the most effective way possible: word of mouth recommendations.

Not being able to give away ebooks was one of my biggest frustrations when I was with a small publisher. The owner simply didn’t understand the value and importance of giving away books to reach a wider audience. But this time around, I have a giveaway posted on LibraryThing and will soon post one on Goodreads and International Thriller Writers. I’ll send copies to at least another hundred bloggers and fans too. Why not? Very few of these people were waiting to buy the book the moment it was released, so there’s nothing to lose. My fans who are waiting to buy the book will do so anyway. Some will accept a free copy from me, then buy another copy as a gift for a friend to be supportive.

Of course, I’m also planning a blog book tour in early September (with print giveaways too), and I’ve purchased some promotional spots to reach readers who will pay for the book. But the word-of-mouth recommendations I’ll get from the giveaways is not something I can buy. Ebooks and social networking sites have bridged the gap between readers and new authors, and in many ways leveled the playing field. It’s a beautiful thing.

If you’d like a digital review copy of The Arranger: A Futuristic Thriller post a comment and email me to let me know if you want mobi (Kindle) or epub.

Here’s the back cover copy.
The year is 2023 and ex-detective Lara Evans is working as a freelance paramedic in a bleak new world. She responds to an emergency call and is nearly killed when a shooter flees the home. Inside she finds the federal employment commissioner wounded, but she’s able to save his life.

The next day Lara leaves for the Gauntlet—a national competition of intense physical and mental challenges with high stakes for her home state. She spots the assailant lurking at the arena and soon after, she lands in deep trouble. Who is the mysterious killer and what is motivating him? Can Lara stop him, stay alive, and win the Gauntlet?

Readers: Are you reading new authors because of an ebook giveaway?
Writers: Do you think I’m crazy for giving away my books?
 

This is a reprint from the Crime Fiction Collective site, by LJ Sellers, author of the bestselling Detective Jackson series.

Five Secrets Of Better Proofreading

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This post, by Matthew Stibbe, originally appeared on his Bad Language site on 8/8/11.

 Proofreading can be a time-consuming task. Being a good proofreader requires being thorough and accurate. Letting even a few errors slip through the cracks can be a source of embarrassment for any writer. Since most writers do not want to let proofreading cut into their writing time, finding a balance between speed and quality is important. Using the following suggestions can help you speed up your proofreading process without diminishing the quality of your efforts:

 

  1. Create a checklist. Organize your proofreading efforts by writing down all the areas you will need to cover. A checklist can cover things such as grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. Simply check off each item on the list once you have completed it.
     
  2. Do a preliminary read. Rather than diving right into the document, briefly read over it once before starting your actual proofreading. Make a note of what stands out and come back to it when you start. It will help guide your efforts so you know where to focus your energies when you proofread.

Read the rest of the post, which includes three more proofreading tips, on Matthew Stibbe‘s Bad Language.

40+ Tips To Improve Your Grammar And Punctuation

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This post, by Jay White, originally appeared on his Dumb Little Man site on 12/22/2007.

After all these years you finally have the courage and opportunity to write the email announcing that you and you alone have single handedly saved the company from utter disaster. You’re excited, you type it, you spell check it, and you hit send.

Everything is great except that your gold star memo has dangling modifiers, double negatives and run-on sentences colliding with each other.

Now I am no grammar whiz but I know a good resource when I see it. Purdue University maintains an online writing lab and I spent some time digging through it. Originally the goal was to grab some good tips that would help me out at work and on this site, but there is simply too much not to share.

Learn and enjoy!

Adjectives and adverbs

Nouns

Prepositions


Read the rest of the post on Jay White’s Dumb Little Man.

Will Print And Ebook Publishers Ultimately Be Doing The Same Books?

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files blog on the Idea Logical Company site on 8/7/11. 

Recent performance reports from Simon & Schuster and Penguin, which can be taken as indicative in some ways of what’s going on at the rest of the Big Six and instructive about what’s happening across trade publishing, say that revenue is flat or down, profits are up, and the ebook share of revenue is growing. The most recent reports were that ebooks grew to 14% of revenue at Penguin and at Simon & Schuster.

First a few observations about what those numbers really mean, and then some thoughts about the implications for the months to come.

We must remember we’re comparing apples and oranges when we talk about the percentage of sales that are ebooks versus print books. This percentage is, presumably, arrived at by adding print book sales (which are shipments subject to returns) to ebook sales (which are actual consumer purchases with zero or negligible returns) and then dividing the ebook revenue number by the total revenue number.

This explains the apparent anomaly pointed out in the S&S reporting which sees the ebook percentage higher in the first quarter than in the second, which has occurred in successive years. This is not actually hard to understand. One report I saw pointed to part of the explanation: that Christmas recipients of ereading devices are loading them up in January, an effect which is absent in the second quarter. But what is also the case is that Q1 print sales (which are shipments, let’s remember) are depressed by two factors: they contain returns from Q4 Christmas sell-in and Q1 is not normally a big one for new book shipments.

So as long as there are larger shipments of returnable print taking place in anticipation of Christmas sales and large numbers of new device owners created each Christmas, we can expect the Q1 number to be artificially inflated and the Q2 number to show an apparent decline.

The annual Q2 decline is only apparent; it is not real.

The percentage of revenue number lends itself to misinterpretation. It is an average. You will pardon me for repeating the truth that “the six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that is an average of three feet deep.” Averages are misleading. That mid-teens percentage number, quite aside from the apples-and-oranges base of it, is also misleading. (I hasten to emphasize that nobody is being deliberately misleading; there is no suggestion intended here that the number isn’t real or that there is any desire to lead people to mistaken conclusions by reporting it.)

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files blog.

The Lawsuit US Publishers And Apple Are Facing Over Agency Pricing

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This article, by Philip Jones, originally appeared on the Futurebook blog on 8/10/11.

Five US publishers and Apple have been named in a US lawsuit that alleges the companies "illegally fix prices of electronic books" and that the publishing houses "forced Amazon to abandon its discount pricing and adhere to a new agency model, in which publishers set prices". The suit alleges that "collusion was a necessary ingredient of the publisher defendants’ anticompetitive plan to gain direct control over e-book pricing".

Sounds scary enough, but if you look at the detail of the complaint there isn’t a whole lot of evidence to back it accusations of conspiracy, though it will nevertheless raise concerns on both sides of the pond, particularly as regulatory inquiries are ongoing.

US law firm Hagens Berman filed the suit in a San Francisco Federal Court against Apple, along with Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, over the agency model of e-book pricing. The same firm is also investigating claims that several large e-book publishers are under-reporting the number of e-books sold, paying authors less than their share of royalties. Worryingly for publishers, the law firm claims that once approved, the lawsuit would represent any purchaser of an e-book published by a major publisher after the adoption of the agency model by that publisher, and has called for "potential plaintiffs" to get in touch via an online form.

The suit has its origins in the switch to the agency model in early 2010, led by Macmillan US, which resulted for a period in that publisher’s e-books being delisted from the Amazon.com website. You can trawl through The Bookseller’s articles from that time here. Though Macmillan moved first, it was closely followed by Hachette USA in early February, and ultimately by the three other US publishers named in the suit – but not by Random House, which did not switch until late last year, and is not named in the filing.

Read the rest of the article on the Futurebook blog.

Is God Necessary In Christian Fiction?

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In Mike Duran’s post How Do We “Glorify God” in Our Writing? I discovered I wasn’t the only person asking if you can write a Christian story without specifically mentioning God.

As Mike points out, it seems most Christian writers (and I would say most Christians) think you absolutely must include God specifically in a story in order for it to be Christian:

…And, sadly, that’s what many folks mean by glorifying God in their writing. For most Christian writers, glorifying God is all about their message. It means not backing away from the Gospel and not avoiding references to Christ in their novel. It means developing content that is virtuous, redemptive, and spiritually uplifting.

Which leads me to ask: Can only writers of explicit “Christian content” glorify God in their writing?…

IF NOT — if only Christian writers can glorify God in Christian stories — then how can a Christian ever hope to “do all to the glory of God”?

IF SO — if Christians can glorify God in whatever kind of story they write (or task, service, job they perform) — then how is glorifying God in a Christian story any different than glorifying God in a “secular” story?…

This is a question I’ve struggled with for years. I enjoy reading secular fantasy. I’ve tried reading Christian fantasy, but found it lacking (although I really enjoy Christian thrillers like This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti). My natural inclination is to write secular fantasy, but I feel compelled to follow the path writing greats like C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien have blazed. They wrote what they wanted to read because what they wanted wasn’t already abundantly available.

I want to write Christian fantasy that I would want to read, which may or may not explicitly mention God. But would it be considered Christian if I don’t get explicit about the Gospel?

So, what do you think? Should writers mention God in order for their work to be considered Christian, or can a Christian writer “glorify God” without getting specific?

 

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s The Road to Writing.

Why Are Agents Speaking Anonymously About Amazon Publishing?

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This post, by Richard Curtis, originally appeared on e-reads on 8/14/11.

In a recent Publishers Weekly article about Amazon’s foray into trade book publishing, every agent PW interviewed spoke “under condition of anonymity.” Why?

Apparently, writes PW’s Rachel Deahl, “their chief concern is selling a book to an untested entity. One agent said he would be particularly leery about taking a big author to Amazon. ‘As a matter of rule, I don’t like to test the waters with big authors. I’d rather deal with a firm that is well established.’”

We find this statement astounding. It seems to equate Amazon Publishing with all those one-horse self-publication presses with interchangeable names started up by penniless ex-editors. What makes these agents imagine that Amazon, boasting enough assets to acquire all Big Six publishers without raising a sweat, would fail at book publishing any more than it has failed at any other goal it has set for itself?

The anonymous agent’s remark is even more puzzling when you look at the deals reported daily in Publishers Lunch and note how many famous agents are making “nice” deals for books by big name clients with those selfsame small presses after the Big Six turned them down. “Nice” is defined (by Lunch‘s founder Michael Cader) as advances of $1 to $49,000, sums that no self-respecting superagent would be caught dead admitting just a few years ago.

 

Read the rest of the post on e-reads.

What It's Like Being A Writer: An Examination and Explanation

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/10/11.

Okay, you know how Muggles don’t get what it’s like being a wizard? And how crazy people don’t know what it’s like being sane and sane people don’t know what it’s like being crazy?

Those who are not writers do not know what it’s like to be a writer. Ask someone who is not infected with the Authorial Virus (Types A through G) what a writer does and you’ll probably get a blank stare. Then that person will noodle it and shrug and say, “He sits up there in his room with his My Little Ponies, pooping fairy tales out of his fingertips for ten minutes. Then he masturbates and talks to people on Twitter.”

[Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

Masturbate? Well, fine. Everybody’s got a lunch hour, and it doesn’t take me 60 minutes to eat a damn sandwich. Nothing wrong with exploring my own body with various textures and food products. As for Twitter? Hey, you go and mill around the water cooler like a bunch of thirsty water bison, and I go and mill around Twitter like a digital version of the same.

But I do not defecate fairy tales out of my fingertips. If only the act of writing was quite so simple as all that.

(And, by the way, leave my ponies out of it. They didn’t do anything to you.)

Point being, it’s time to take this big callused toe of mine and drag it across the sand. There, then, is the line. On this side is me, the penmonkey. On that side is you, the… I dunno. Pen-muggle. Shut up.

What I’m trying to say is, this is what it means to be a writer. Got people in your life who just don’t grok the trials and tribulations of the everyday word-chucker? Show them this.

I Swear On The Life Of Word Jesus, It’s Actually Work

This one sucks because you know what? I get it. I’ve tried explaining to people what I do, and at no point does it sound like work. “Uhh, well, I wake up at 6AM and I get my coffee and then I get in front of the computer and I… make stuff up… and then I try to convince people to buy the things I just… made up.” It sounds like the world’s biggest scam and explains why so many people want to be writers.

I might as well have said, “I sit out in a sunlit meadow and play Candyland with a bunch of puppies.”

Let’s just clear this one up right now:

Writing is work. It’s not back-breaking labor, no — though, by now I probably do have scoliosis (and a Deep-Vein Thrombosis whose clot-bullet will probably detonate in my brain) — but it is mind-breaking just the same. I can sit here for hours metaphorically head-butting the computer monitor until this story — or article, or blog-post, or sex-toy instruction manual — bleeds out across the screen. And then I have to keep fucking with it, keep hacking it apart and juicing my skull-meats until it all makes sense. Everything else is emails and spreadsheets and outlines and porn and shame and homelessness.

Am I doing work on par with fire fighters or soldiers? Fuuuuu-huuuu-huuuck no. But neither are you, Mister Cubicle Monkey. Or you, Target clerk. So. You know. Hush up.

All I’m saying is, no, I don’t need a “real job” because I already have one.


Read the rest of the post on Chuck Wendig‘s terribleminds.

Publishing Service Index – August 2011

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This will probably be the last index published until late September/early October as I have a pretty busy schedule  coming up over the next two months. I suspect as we move closer to the financial quarter four for 2011, there will be quite a number of changes with a the companies I include in the index. There are one or two publishing services that I don’t expect to see surviving into 2012, and there are also a few at the bottom I am considering removing because of their poor showing, lack of foresight and development, and output.

The index takes a great deal of time to put together, and it involves following and analyzing not just the 70 companies included here, but a further 50+ on the edge of entering the index. As always, I would ask companies to keep me updated on what they perceive to be improvements to their services, but again, as always in my correspondence with them; don’t spam me with correspondence about actual books. I am not interested. The Publishing Index was set up to review your company services and it is not a device or platform to promote your authors or books. What matters to me is the value of your services, experienced by your authors.

Let me once again thank the authors and companies who regularly feed me back with updates, experiences and information which all goes into producing the Publishing Index chart every month. Your input is invaluable and always welcome.

Beyond my own reviews on each company (which plays a small part in each company’s index evaluation), all the data gathered is entirely subjective and based on positive and negative correspondence and formulaic analysis. I deliberately avoid making my own comments when the chart is produced and published each month, in so far as highlighting movements of significance in the index. It should speak for itself if followed closely. The companies in the top 20 are there for a reason, because they follow and respect the core values a good self-publishing service should offer. If you want to know what those vales are then you’d best go here to read the book I published on self-publishing, or here, to read the articles I have written on the values I believe should exist in self publishing.

For now, here is the [publishing service] index for August [2011]…

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney’s The Independent Publishing Magazine.