Month: August 2014

Authors Teaching Authors and the Idea of “Slow PR”

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This post by Michael Blanding originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 8/29/14.

When Maria Mutch needed advice on how to handle PR of her debut memoir, she found guidance and solace through Grub Street Writer’s Launch Lab in Boston.

Maria Mutch has two words to describe how she felt about her publication of her memoir Know the Night this year: “Utter terror!” She laughs. “Okay, not quite—but not so far off. Obviously I was happy that my book was coming out, but publishing and book promotion seemed to be filled with so many unknowns.”

Mutch knows what it is like to struggle with fear of the unknown. Her book is anything but the typical memoir, chronicling the two years she spent awake virtually every night with her son Gabriel, who is autistic and also has Down Syndrome, and rarely slept through the night. Alternatingly lonely, funny, and exhilarating, it also weaves in the story of Admiral Richard Byrd, the Antarctic explorer who battled his own form of solitude and loneliness, and in whose story Mutch found unexpected solace and inspiration.

 

Pursuing Publicity

When it came time to embark on publicity for her new book, she knew she didn’t want to go it alone. Reaching out for others going through the same process, she found it in Launch Lab, Grub Street Writer’s intensive boot camp for new authors, in Boston. “It seemed like a great way to demystify the whole process,” she says. “It also seemed like a great way to get some comrades, and I couldn’t have been more right.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Why Book Criticism and Literary Culture Needs a Poptimist Revolution

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This post by Elisabeth Donnelly originally appeared on Flavorwire on 8/28/14.

When bestselling author Jennifer Weiner was profiled by The New Yorker in January 2014 in an article called “Written Off,” writer Rebecca Mead made sure to outline Weiner’s two audiences: one, the loyal readers of her books, who propel them onto the best-seller list, and number two, a pricklier sort, consisting of the “writers, editors, and critics… who have given Weiner a parallel notoriety, as an unlikely feminist enforcer.” The short version is that, through Twitter (and her following, which currently numbers about 93K), Weiner used her platform to needle such august institutions as The New York Times Book Review and everyplace else with mediocre VIDA counts regarding the amounts of space they give to reviewing and considering the three books that “matter” for the season written by male authors like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, while simultaneously ignoring the span of women’s writing, and, additionally, commercial fiction.

Like any provocateur’s performance, it was equal parts annoying — if you see book reviewing as advocacy for the little guy, a review of a Weiner novel is certainly not part of that performance — and righteous truth. It’s sexist that book critics can ignore Weiner while making sure to cover the next book by a Stephen King (who bridges “commercial” and also gets literary cred all the time).

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

Cultural Appropriation and the Inclusion of the Other

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 8/8/14.

I read this excellent article by Jim C Hines today. I agree with it completely. There has been much discussion on published writing, especially SFF, being an old white man’s club and that we need to see more diversity in the stories we read. Then there are people saying that white people shouldn’t/can’t/aren’t allowed to write other cultures. It’s not actually a problem, because the second opinion is bullshit. Let me explain.

I don’t believe any subject or culture is off-limits for fiction. With fiction we actively engage with the world around us, we interrogate our reality and look at how it reflects back at us and we try to make some sense of it. Even the most dense, hard SF is, at its core, an exploration of simple humanity. In my world I’m surrounded by people of many races and cultures. I’m surrounded by people of varying sexuality. I will absolutely reflect that in my fiction. If I don’t, the darkest and most fantastical part of any dark fantasy or horror I write is this imagined homogenous world of hetero cis white people like me. That’s just horrible. I do not want to be a part of that vanilla environment.

 

Click here to read the full post on Warrior Scribe.

 

Put Calls To Action In The Back Of Your Books To Sell More Books

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This post originally appeared on the Book Marketing Tools blog on 5/5/14.

There are two different kinds of book marketing, active marketing and passive marketing, and both are important.

Active marketing is when you go out to tell others about your book through blog tours, giveaways, free promotions, tweeting about your book, and more.

Passive marketing is setting up fan building and book selling mechanisms once, which will help you to continue to sell books passively once they are all set up.

A combination of both of these forms of book marketing will definitely help you to sell more books.

 

Use Calls To Action
Putting calls to action in the back of your book is a form of passive marketing that will help you to sell more books. Once you set up these calls to action and you publish the update to your books, you’re done, but they will continue to help you to sell books.

If a reader makes it to the end of your book, they are going to go somewhere. Direct them where you need them to go. If you can direct them in a specific direction, then you are likely to keep them as a reader. If you don’t, they may move onto the next book in their reading list, then you will have lost the opportunity to continue to sell to them.

 

Click here to read the full post on Book Marketing Tools.

 

How to Write a Book or Blog (The 6 Danger Stages You Need To Overcome)

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This post by Ali Luke originally appeared on Write to Done on 7/24/14.

You’ve probably had the experience of starting a novel or blog with great intentions…

…only to find that, a few months later, you’ve barely made any progress.

Maybe you started strong but lost momentum.

Maybe you jumped ahead when you should’ve paused.

Or maybe you got discouraged and gave up.

And you wonder: how to write a book (or blog).

I’ve coached many writers in workshop groups over the past few years, and I’ve noticed that there are six key stages when projects often stall or go wrong.

Here’s what to watch out for.

 

Danger Stage #1: Once You’ve Got a Great Idea

Let’s say you’ve got a new idea you’re excited about. Perhaps it’s a great premise for a novel, a topic for a blog, or a prompt you want to work on for a short story.

Writers tend to make one of two mistakes here:

They jump straight in, full of enthusiasm, without planning. They make a great start, and might get a few chapters into the novel or a few posts into a blog…but then they get stuck.

They wait – and wait – until the “perfect moment” to begin actually writing. They put off starting until they’ve got past family commitments and a busy spell at work…or they read about their chosen field of writing without getting any words down on paper.

 

Click here to read the full post on Write to Done.

 

The Three Reasons I Have Fallen In Love With Writing Short Stories

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This post by M. Louisa Locke originally appeared on her blog on 6/12/14.

I am the last author you would think would be writing short stories. As a writer who tends to be prolix, the short form wouldn’t seem a good match for me. I don’t write anything short––not emails, not blog posts, not books. Twitter, forget it––the most I can do is retweet those of you who are good at being succinct. I don’t even read many short stories, (except by 19th century writers like Alcott, Wharton, and James).

Yet, this spring I took time off from doing the research for Deadly Proof, the next book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series, to write my third and fourth short stories, which are now part of a collection, Victorian San Francisco Stories, that I just published on Kindle, and I have every intention of putting out more short stories in the coming year.

 

So what happened?

Dandy Detects, my first short story happened. Three months after the publication of my first book in my series, Maids of Misfortune, I started to write a short story about the Boston terrier I had introduced in the book. I had read that publishing an inexpensive short story was a good way of introducing potential readers to your work, so my reason was completely pragmatic. Maids of Misfortune was selling less than one ebook a day, and I wanted to feel like I was doing something to help gain it some visibility. I was only producing about two blog posts a month (remember my tendency to be long-winded), and writing a short story and putting it up on Kindle seemed like manageable activity.

Dandy Detects ended up doing more than I could have thought possible to boost sales. Stephen Windwalker picked it as one of his earliest Kindle Shorts on Kindle Nation Daily (probably the first site to effectively promote ebooks) over the weekend of July 4, 2010. This prompted so many people to buy the full-length book that Maids of Misfortune raced to the top of the historical mystery category, where it stayed for over two years.

But even more significantly—writing this story turned out to be great fun, and the readers enjoyed it. Dandy Detect also was less than 8000 words—a triumph for me since I swear I have blog posts longer than that!

While I didn’t write the next story for another two years (in this case after the publication of my second novel), during that time I started keeping track of short story plots I wanted to write. By the time I had written my third story, I had concluded that writing short stories is about more than providing a loss leader to sell other books. In fact, I believe that, particularly for authors of series, short stories can be one of the most effective methods of building and maintaining both the readers’ and the author’s enthusiasm for a series.

 

Reason #1: Short stories permit me to expand on events, places, and, most importantly, characters from my longer novels.

 

Click here to read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.

 

More Verbal Abuse Among Young “50 Shades” Readers

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This post by Andy Henion – Michigan State originally appeared on Futurity on 8/22/14.

Young women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are more likely than others to show signs of eating disorders and have a verbally abusive partner, a new study suggests.

Further, those who read all three books in the Fifty Shades erotic romance series are at increased risk of engaging in binge drinking and having multiple sex partners.

All are known risks associated with being in an abusive relationship, much like the lead character, Anastasia, is in Fifty Shades, says Amy Bonomi, the study’s lead investigator. And while the study did not distinguish whether women experienced the health behaviors before or after reading the books, it’s a potential problem either way, she says.

“If women experienced adverse health behaviors such as disordered eating first, reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma,” says Bonomi, chairperson and professor in Michigan State University’s department of human development and family studies.

“Likewise, if they read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviors seen in our study, it’s possible the books influenced the onset of these behaviors.”

 

Depictions of violence

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a link to the source study, on Futurity.

 

Whisper, Don't Shout

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This post by Jill J. Marsh originally appeared on her site on 8/25/14.

How to get sound onto paper.

An issue I’ve wrestled with for some time, especially when it comes to characters’ voices.

Several recent books irritated me enormously with an excess of signposts as to speech style. Every utterance written semi-phonetically was boring and hard work. An excess of ‘local colour’ turned character into caricature before the story even began. Every single person in a broad cast using the same vocabulary but with different adverbs equalled monotony.

The reason the books above failed is for exactly the same reason writers should show, not tell.

Leave space for the reader’s imagination. Inference is a powerful and natural phenomenon.

Do not tell. Do not shout. Whisper and let us follow the clues. We may end up in different places. That is our prerogative.

The complexity of rendering voices, accents, speech impediments or verbal tics on paper while not getting on the reader’s wick is both tricky and simple. I often write characters who speak other languages than English. How close to native speaker should they sound? Would adding mistakes in English add authenticity or distract? A key character has a peculiarity of expression – should I explain or risk incomprehension?

 

Click here to read the full post on Jill J. Marsh’s site.

 

Bubble Vocabulary: The Words You Almost Know, Sometimes Use, But Are Secretly Unsure Of.

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This post by Seth Stevenson originally appeared on Slate on 4/29/14.

Shibboleth. Casuistry. Recondite.

A little while back, I was chatting with a friend when he described a situation as “execrable.” He pronounced it “ex-EH-crable.” I’d always thought it was “EX-ecrable.” But execrable is a word I’d mostly just read in books, had rarely heard spoken, and had never once, in my whole life, uttered aloud—in large part because I wasn’t exactly sure how to say it, and because the nuances of its definition (beyond “bad”) escaped me.

Since we have a trusting, forthright relationship, I decided to broach the topic. “Is that how you pronounce that word?” I asked. “And what exactly does it mean?” Here my friend confessed he was not 100 percent certain on either count. He added that, earlier that same day, he’d pronounced avowed with three syllables and then immediately wondered if it might only have two.

We’ve all experienced moments in which we brush up against the ceilings of our personal lexicons. I call it “bubble vocabulary.” Words on the edge of your ken, whose definitions or pronunciations turn out to be just out of grasp as you reach for them. The words you basically know but, hmmm, on second thought, maybe haven’t yet mastered?

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes a Bubble Vocabulary quiz, on Slate.

 

Five Great Ways To Combat Writer’s Block

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This post by blurb staff originally appeared on blurb on 8/8/14.

You’re sitting at your computer, staring at a blank document. You’re poised in front of your notebook, but can’t seem to move your pen. Sound familiar? Writer’s block strikes again. But you don’t have to suffer for long. Great writers throughout the years have faced this problem and come up with clever tricks to get the words flowing again. If you’re having trouble getting your writing project finished (or started) here is some advice to get you going.

1) Just start typing or writing
It really doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as you’re saying something. Simply typing the same word over and over again, the simple motion of typing with your fingers, can force your brain to come up with something clever eventually.

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’” — Maya Angelou

Even drawing or doodling—just moving your pen around on paper—can set your imagination going. Consider writing captions for your drawings, word bubbles for pictures of people talking, anything and everything that simply gets words on paper.

 

2) Pretend you’re writing for yourself

 

Click here to read the full post on blurb.

 

A Guide to Pinterest for Fiction & Nonfiction Writers: 15 Best Practices

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This post by Frances Caballo originally appeared on Writer.ly on 8/8/14.

Pinterest and SEO

It can be tempting to get lost in the floral images, funny quotes, and pictures of dreamy kitchens on Pinterest, and that’s okay. However, there’s more to Pinterest than collecting DIY, wedding, and craft images while you sip a cup of tea or glass of wine at the end of the day. Pinterest is also a powerful network that can improve the SEO of your blog and website. Here are some tips:

Always categorize your pinboards. Pinterest has gone to great lengths to assist search engines that crawl the Web looking for new content. By using the platform’s own categories, you will alert search engines to the content of your boards.

A common pinboard title is Favorite Books. Search engines crawling the Web will notice the word Books and tie some of your entries to the more general category of books. For example, if your book cover is on your Favorite Books pinboard, search engines may link your book to the category of Books and in turn index your book, improving your SEO.

You can drive traffic to your blog with Pinterest. Use the Pin It Button in your browser to add images from your blog to your pinboards. When another user clicks on the image, they will immediately be directed to your blog.

 

Best Practices

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes 15 specific best practices tips, on Writer.ly.

 

Writing A Relationship

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This post by Adam Ganz originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 8/20/14.

About a year ago I sat in the Members’ Room at the Royal Society as Professor Judith Howard FRS, once a doctoral student of Dorothy Hodgkin’s, explained how crystallographers worked in the early days. She showed me how Dorothy would begin by calibrating the black circles in an X-ray diffraction pattern by eye, to begin the long process of assembling from the shadows cast by an X-ray beam the complex three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in the molecule. Hanging on the wall outside was a Henry Moore drawing of Dorothy’s arthritic hands, the hands she said she thought with.

What intrigued me [was] seeing the combination of skills she needed, not only mathematics but hand and eye co-ordination and vision to work out how the thousand atoms in say the Vitamin B12 molecule fitted together. It was somewhere between chess and Rubik cube- a giant jigsaw puzzle where she couldn’t see the picture, or even all the pieces.

I met Judith as part of my research for a radio play about Dorothy Hodgkin and Margaret Thatcher, two extraordinary women who reached the pinnacle in their chosen spheres –and were about as different as any two women could be.  From 1943 to 1947 Hodgkin was the then Margaret Roberts’ s chemistry tutor at Somerville College, Oxford from 1943 -1947 when Hodgkin was working at the cutting edge of X ray crystallography. In her fourth year Thatcher worked in Hodgkin’s lab on a molecule called Gramicidin S, which originated in the Soviet Union and had some antibiotic properties.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.

 

Scam Alert: Editors Beware

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This post by Dave Bricker originally appeared on The World’s Greatest Book on 8/11/14.

I was con­tacted by a not-so-articulate per­son who requested my ser­vices as an edi­tor for an arti­cle. I looked at his doc­u­ment and found a ten-page para­graph that needed plenty of help. I wrote a polite response explain­ing that this piece would be time-consuming and expen­sive to edit, but the author seemed intent on hav­ing me rewrite it. He read­ily agreed to my price, explained his 30-day dead­line and told me he’d send a check.

If this doesn’t sound sus­pi­cious to you, it should.

Pay atten­tion and stay safe.

In a relationship-based busi­ness like edit­ing or design, a new client is almost always a referral.

“I saw the work you did for Jim Smith. I was won­der­ing if you ….”

If you pub­lish a web­site or blog, intro­duc­tions invari­ably start with,

“I read the arti­cle you posted about ….”

This client vol­un­teered no point of reference.

 

Click here to read the full article on The World’s Greatest Book.

 

14 Books That Change When You Reread Them Later in Life

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This post by Andrea Romano originally appeared on Mashable on 8/17/14.

As you get older, you start seeing the world a little differently — the same goes for the books you read.

Whether it was a book you were forced to read in sophomore English class or your favorite childhood novel, some literary classics have a strange way of changing when we revisit them as adults. For better or worse, things just can’t stay the same.

You may find yourself rereading these familiar titles a little differently once you’ve started writing your own life chapters. It’s funny what a little life experience can do.

 

1. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

When you’re 15, you totally understand Holden Caulfield’s angst and isolation. However, reread this literary classic in your thirties and you start to roll your eyes every time this protagonist calls someone a “phony.”

 

2. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

The heartwarming story of the self-sacrificing tree that gave everything it had to provide for the boy it loved becomes a slightly sad and disturbing story when you gain a more worldly perspective. As the boy takes more and more from the tree in the story, you start to think, “how about some quid pro quo?”

 

Click here to read the full post on Mashable.

 

Ten Things You Should Know About HP Lovecraft

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This post by Sian Cain originally appeared on The Guardian Books Blog on 8/20/14.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on this day in 1890. We celebrate his birthday with 10 titbits about the father of weird and wonderful horror

1. Both his mother and father were separately committed to the same mental institution

Winfield Scott Lovecraft was committed to Butler Hospital after being diagnosed with psychosis when HP Lovecraft was only three years old. He died in 1898, when HP was eight. To this day, rumours persist that Winfield had syphilis, but neither HP nor his mother ever displayed symptoms.

Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft was later committed to Butler in 1919. She remained in close correspondence with her son for two years, until she died of complications after surgery.

 

2. He wanted to be a professional astronomer but never finished high school

As a sickly child, Lovecraft only attended school sporadically and was essentially self-educated. He was drawn to astronomy and chemistry, and the writings of gothic authors such as Edgar Allan Poe. Due to what he termed a “nervous breakdown”, Lovecraft never finished high school and instead only dabbled informally in his passions.

 

3. He rarely went out in public during daylight

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian Books Blog.