Month: October 2014

10 of Literature’s Greatest Comeback Books

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This post by Emily Temple originally appeared on Flavorwire on 10/24/13.

Though Tom Wolfe’s last novel, 2004’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, fell flat for many readers and reviewers — Michiko Kakutani called it “disappointingly empty” — some critics are heralding his new effort, Back to Blood, which hit bookstores this week, as his comeback book. Only time will tell, of course, but the idea got us thinking about a few other important books that have pulled some of our favorite authors back from the brink of oblivion (or worse, bad reviews). After the jump, read about the many ways authors have dusted off and recharged their careers with a well-placed tome, and as always, add any we’ve missed in the comments [on the original post, here].

 

1. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

The 1940s were not good for Hemingway. He described himself as being “out of business as a writer” from 1942 to 1945, and fell into a depression fueled by physical problems and the fact that many of his friends — Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Max Perkins — were dying around him. In 1950, he published Across the River and Into the Trees, which was roundly panned. The following year, as if in furious revenge, he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, which was to be his last book, and some say his best — in any event, it won a Pulitzer and firmly re-established his literary reputation.

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

Where Do I Write? All Over The Damn Place

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This post by Elisa Albert originally appeared on Guernica on 10/30/14.

On community, urban sprawl, infant mortality, and the Albany food co-op.

1. Office at home

Set up your office and get to work, a friend instructed a few years back, when I complained about the novel, which had plateaued at halfway done and was now just sitting there. I half-heartedly poked at it a few times a week, but the momentum was gone. So I put down an old Ikea kilim, cleared out clutter per the Feng Shui guru, hung pink string lights and cute scrap flags someone sewed me as a gift and a photograph of a feral house in Detroit (which has a thing or two in common with downtown Albany). Suspended some tillasandia with twine. Now I had a nice quiet little room to sit in and contemplate the stalled novel.

Just doing the work is the whole battle, we always say: making contact. Sit with the novel, be in it. Turn off the internet so you have nowhere else to go. Only rarely is it satisfying. Rarely is there a great chunk you can point to at the end of a day and say, here is what I did today! More often there’s the vague fear you’ve made no progress at all. Where did those hours go? Where is your work? What is this adding up to? You have paid someone else to be with your child while you did this bullshit? The thing continues and continues to feel like a wreck. But it’s your wreck. And you are working on it, even when it seems like bullshit, eating your time and appearing none the better. No effort is wasted, says the Bhagavad Gita on a post-it I stuck to the bottom of the giant computer monitor. But God, some days are a slog.

 

2. Leaning against doorjamb while boy plays in the bath

 

Read the full post on Guernica.

 

The Amazon/Hachette Battle and Why It’s Great to Be a Self-Published Author

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This post by Miral Sattar originally appeared on PBS Mediashift on 6/3/14.

After a fantastic BEA (Book Expo America), I’ve been digesting the whole Amazon/Hachette battle. I’ve basically come to the conclusion that it’s an incredible time to be a self-published author.

The first thing that surprised me is that so much has been misreported about the Amazon/Hachette battle. Amazon and Hachette are negotiating their contract terms, and what normally should have been behind-the-door talks is turning into an all-out flame war in the media.

 
Myths:

a) Amazon increased publisher prices.

Amazon can’t increase prices. Amazon acts as a retailer of books. The publisher always sets the price of the books. Amazon only changes the amount of the discount similar to the way Walmart, Target or anyone else would.

b) Amazon removed buy buttons from Hachette titles.

No, Amazon didn’t remove any buy buttons. They just removed pre-order buttons from Hachette titles. Amazon doesn’t make pre-order buttons available to everyone and negotiates with each publisher individually. Readers can still buy their books albeit with delays as posted in the Amazon forums.

 

Read the full post on PBS Mediashift.

 

Using Critical Reviews as Resources

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This post by Elizabeth Spann Craig originally appeared on her site on 10/24/14.

Wired’s founding executive editor Kevin Kelly stated that if writers and other artists have “one thousand true fans” then they’re able to sustain a living from their art.

I don’t honestly know how many true fans I have (and I prefer calling them readers instead of fans) but I know I get nearly-daily emails from readers.

And I do know one true ‘fan’.  She is, actually, my number one fan (no Stephen King reference intended).  She is also my number one critic.  Since she doesn’t have a public presence, I won’t call her out by giving her name online.

She started emailing me over a year ago, giving me feedback on various books in various series. She has mentioned reading each of my books numerous times.

I’m almost positive that she knows my characters better than I do.

 

Read the full post on Elizabeth Spann Craig’s site.

 

The Problem of Entitlement: A Question of Respect

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This post by Steve Almond originally appeared on Poets & Writers on 8/20/14.

This past spring I took a position as a visiting writer at a well-respected MFA program. My students were by and large intelligent and serious, but there were a few moments when I found them—what’s the word I’m looking for here—exasperating.

One day before the fiction workshop, for instance, we got into a discussion about the Best American Short Stories series, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. To my astonishment, a number of students made comments indicating their disdain for the annual anthology.

“Wait a second,” I said. “The stories in those collections are always great.”

There was an awkward pause. Then one of them said, “You’re being ironic, right?”

At this point, I sort of lost it. I told my students that they had every right to dislike particular stories, but that dismissing them entirely was foolish. Then I added something along the lines of, “Why don’t you guys publish a story in Best American and then you can sit in judgment of them.”

It was not my finest moment as a teacher. (And, for the record, I later apologized to the entire class.) It was an impulsive reaction to what I’ve come to think of over the years as the Problem of Entitlement.

I mean by this that a significant number of the students I’ve encountered in creative writing programs display a curious arrogance toward published authors, as well as an inflated sense of their own talents and importance. The same attitudes often prevail in those online precincts where new and emerging writers congregate.

 

Read the full post on Poets & Writers.

 

3 Vital Questions to Build Website Impact

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This post by Donna K. Fitch originally appeared on D’Vorah Lansky’s Build A Business With Your Book.

Why do you have a website? What a silly question. We have websites because we’re supposed to. Everyone else does, right?

But a website without thought behind it, without intentionality, may be doing you more harm than good. Professional web designers ask their clients a series of questions before they do any design work. Improve your website by asking yourself these three questions:

 

1. What do you want to accomplish with your website?

It’s so tempting to pile cool widgets and generic text (“Welcome to my website, I hope you enjoy it”) on your site without considering the purpose. Besides overwhelming the site visitor, the items may be sending mixed messages—or give the impression you’re not sure what business you’re in. If you aren’t sure what you’re trying to achieve, you won’t know when you’ve arrived.

 

Read the full post on Build A Business With Your Book.

 

37 Reasons Why You Should Write A Book

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This post by John Kremer originally appeared on his Book Marketing Bestsellers site.

The sooner your write a book, the better (for you and your business). You can certainly write a book within the next 60 days!

Here are 37 reasons why you should write a book.

 

Make money. You can make money not only by selling your book, but also by selling all the ancillary products and services you can offer.

Money is often the key motivator for many authors, but it certainly isn’t the only reason why you should write a book.

 

Change lives. Books can enlighten, educate, inspire, inform, and entertain. They can and do change lives.

Everyone has at least one story of a book that changed their lives. What book changed your life? Now, write one to change other people’s lives.

 

Sell a product. Use your book to help promote another product, whether a real world product or an online information product. Books can help you sell all your other products and services. Seed your book with the stories of your other products and services. Include case studies, success stories, examples of failure and success.

Books can sell your products and services faster and easier than anything else. Books allow you to showcase what you do, how well you do it, and how your customers benefit from what you offer.

 

Build a career. There’s no better way to build a career than to start by writing a book. Books open doors. Books get respect. Books get you promotions. And books get you job offers, again and again.

 

Boost your credibility. Nothing establishes your authority better than a book. Your book instantly boosts your credibility as a doer, as an expert, as a celebrity, as an authority. Of course, it has to be a good book, a great book, an extraordinary book. The more extraordinary, the more your credibility will grow!

 

Read the full post on Book Marketing Bestsellers.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Why Don’t Men Read Romance Novels?

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This post by Noah Berlatsky originally appeared on Pacific Standard on 10/23/14.

A lot of men just don’t read fiction, and if they do, structural misogyny drives them away from the genre.

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Why do women read romance novels? It’s a question that’s often been asked, explicitly or implicitly. Two groundbreaking 1980s studies, Janice Radway’s anthropological Reading the Romance and Tania Modleski’s more theoretical Loving With a Vengeance, suggested that romance novels provided women with compensatory fantasies. Patriarchy is depressing and oppressive for women, and romance novels understand that and provide a salve.

Other commenters have been more vicious. William Giraldi declared: “Romance novels—parochial by definition, ecumenical in ambition—teach a scurvy lesson: enslavement to the passions is a ticket to happiness.” He concluded that the success of 50 Shades of Grey shows that, “We’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage.” Since the main readers of 50 Shades have been women, the conclusion seems to be that women read this sort of book because they are stunted. If reading romance is seen as deviant or pathological, then the attitude toward romance readers is either condescension or contempt: Romance readers are either poor souls who need help, or they’re debased fools who should be scorned.

 

Read the full post on Pacific Standard.

 

How to Create an Audiobook with ACX

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This post by JD Smith originally appeared on Words With Jam on 9/23/14.

ACX is a service provided by Amazon where authors can hook up with narrators and turn their book into an audio book for distribution through Audible, Amazon and iTunes. Up until this year the service was only available in the US, but now it’s available in the UK. Over the last few months I’ve been working with narrator Paul Hodgson on by book The Rise of Zenobia. You can listen to a sample here.

 

What does ACX actually do?

ACX is basically the interface you use to meet narrators, and deal with all the contractual information once you’ve found a narrator you want to work with. They check the recording quality of audio submitted before it’s put through for distribution. And they also provide a dashboard to keep track of sales and payments.

 

How do I start?

You log in using your Amazon account and the set up is fairly minimal. ACX pulls most of the information of your book from Amazon and you then add a bit more information, to make your book enticing, such as review quotes and possibly sales figures.

 

Read the full post on Words With Jam.

 

Blindness Basics For Authors

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This post by Melinda Primrose originally appeared on her Primrose Path site.

Writing a blind character seems to be much harder than everyone thinks. There are many mistakes being made that I think a little research would go a long way to fixing. Most of the blind characters I’ve seen, either in books or in film media, fit one of two stereotypes. Either the blind character has superhuman abilities because of their blindness or they are completely helpless. Most blind people, in fact, fall somewhere between the two. How do I know this? you ask. I am blind myself.

I was given the label “legally blind” when I was 25. In my younger days, I had 20/20 vision with my glasses. The short version of the long story, which I may go into some day, is that many different diseases attacked my eyes and caused vision loss. Since my initial diagnosis, I’ve had over a dozen surgeries to try and keep what vision I have.

WAIT!

You said you were blind, you say.

I think that is the first thing most people get wrong about blindness. It’s not an either you have vision or you don’t Kind of thing. In the United States, legally blind is defined as:

 

Read the full post on Primrose Path.

 

Single Quotes or Double Quotes? It’s Really Quite Simple.

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This post by Andrew Heisel originally appeared on Slate on 10/21/14.

If you are an American, using quotation marks could hardly be simpler: Use double quotation marks at all times unless quoting something within a quotation, when you use single. It’s different in the greater Anglosphere, where they generally use singles in books and doubles in newspapers. It’s still pretty simple, but nothing so straightforward as here.

Yet some of us don’t seem happy with what we’ve got. For several years now in teaching writing classes to college freshmen, I’ve noticed some students adopt another rule: double quotes for long quotations, single quotes for single words or short phrases. They’ll quote a long passage from Measure for Measure accurately, but when they want to quote one of Shakespeare’s words, a cliché, or some dubious concept like “virtue,” they’ll go with single quotes.

It took me a while to understand what was going on, but after thoroughly studying it I developed a rigorous explanation for this staggering decline in standards: kids today.

But then I looked up from their papers to find this usage in the manuscript of a friend’s novel. Then I saw them in another friend’s manuscript—this time, of an academic book. Then I turned to the Internet and they were everywhere—in a local news story, in a paper by a college professor, in a blog on social marketing, in a blog on the education system, on the website of the Children’s Literacy Foundation. In each case, the same short/single, long/double quote rule was followed.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

How to Write an Author Bio When You Don't Feel Like an Author…Yet

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This post by Anne R. Allen originally appeared on her blog on 9/9/12.

Maybe you’ve got a novel finished and you’ve been sending out queries. Lots. And you’re getting rejections. Lots. Or worse, that slow disappointment of no response at all.

Or maybe you write short fiction and poetry and you’ve got a bunch of pieces you’ve been sending out to contests and literary journals. You’ve won a few local contests, but so far you haven’t had much luck getting into print.

You may still be afraid to tell more than a handful of people you’re a writer. You’d feel pretentious calling yourself an “author.”

But it might be time to start—at least privately.

Because one day, in the not too distant future, you’ll open your email and there it will be:

The response from an editor: “You’re the winner of our October ‘Bad Witch’ short story contest. We’d like to publish your story, Glinda: Heartbreaker of Oz in our next issue. Please send us your Author Bio.”
Or just when you were giving up hope, you get that reply from your dream agent: “I’m intrigued by your novel Down and Out on the Yellow Brick Road. Please send the first fifty pages, and an Author Bio.”

You’re so excited you’re jumping out of your skin, so you dash something off in five minutes and hit “send.” Wow. You’re going to be in print! Or maybe get an agent. Let’s get this career on the road!

Whoa. You do NOT want to dash off an author bio in five minutes. Every word you send out there is a writing sample, not just those well-honed pages or stories.

 

Read the full post, which includes a 10-step guide to writing an author bio, on Anne R. Allen’s blog.

 

Let's NOT Start At The Very Beginning

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This post by Lorraine Mace originally appeared on The Writer’s ABC Checklist on 1/29/13.

This is going to be a novel approach to talking about writing a novel (excuse the pun). I’m calling in my alter ego, Frances di Plino, to guest post over the next few weeks on the subject. The reason I’m not making the posts as Lorraine Mace is that I haven’t yet had a novel published under my own name. Frances, on the other hand, is not only a published author of a crime/thriller (Bad Moon Rising published last year by Crooked Cat Publishing), but she is also in the throes of finishing off the next in the Paolo Storey series, Someday Never Comes. All of which means that Frances, rather than Lorraine, is the person best placed to give tips and advice on the long, hard slog to your first published novel.

So, bye bye, Lorraine, for now, and hello to Frances.

Let’s not start at the very beginning (even though it’s usually a very good place to start, as Maria sang in The Sound of Music).

This week’s question is: have you started your novel in the right place? Some good advice, given to me more years ago than I care to recall, was to start your opening chapter as close to the action as you possibly can.

You want to get your readers instantly involved in the plot and in the lives of the characters. You need the readers to be invested emotionally and intellectually in what happens next. Open with dialogue, action, or both, but make sure you hook your readers from the first paragraph.

 

Read the full post on The Writer’s ABC Checklist.

 

Things You Should Know When Writing About Guns

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 10/14/14. Note that it contains strong language.

[NOTE: The below post is not meant to be an endorsement for or a prohibition against guns in the real world in which we all live. It is a discussion of firearms in fiction. Keep comments civil… or I’ll boot you out the airlock into the silent void.]

Guns, man. Guns.

*flexes biceps*

*biceps which turn into shotguns that blow encroaching ninjas to treacly gobbets*

CH-CHAK.

Ahem.

If you’re a writer in a genre space — particularly crime, urban fantasy, some modes of sci-fi — you are likely to write about some character using some gun at some point.

And when you write about the use of a gun in your story, you’re going to get something wrong. When you do, you will get a wordy email by some reader correcting you about this, because if there’s one thing nobody can abide you getting wrong in your writing, then by gosh and by golly, it’s motherfucking guns. Like how in that scene in The Wheel Of Game of Ringdragons when Tyrion the Imp uses the Heckler & Koch MP7 to shoot the horse out from under Raistlin and Frodo, the author, Sergei R. R. Tolkeen, gets the cartridge wrong. What an asshole, am I right?

You can get lots of things wrong, but you get guns wrong?

You’ll get emails.

As such, you should endeavor to get this stuff right. If only to spare yourself the time.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.