Month: June 2015

The Crisis In Non-Fiction Publishing

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This editorial by Sam Leith originally appeared on The Guardian on 6/26/15.

When it comes to high-calibre non-fiction, risk-averse trade publishing houses are producing too many copycat ‘smart thinking’ books that promise more than they deliver. But praise should be given to the university presses

mid the ambient wails of doom about the publishing industry, I’d like to enter a note of encouragement. The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.

At the moment, I don’t think there’s a trade publishing house producing high-calibre, serious non-fiction of the quality and variety of Yale University Press; and snapping at its heels are Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge and Chicago. As the literary editor of a middlebrow news magazine I’m finding ever more of the reviews I commission are from such presses.

Where 15 or 20 years ago the big trade publishers were, oddly, swamping the market with sort-of-scholarly micro-histories of salt or longitude, they now seem, with exceptions of course, to be tiptoeing away from specific, knotty, deeply researched and nuanced books about things. The sorts of book on which they tend now to rely are investigations of “big ideas”. Their lodestars or exemplars are the Malcolm Gladwells and Daniel Kahnemans and Nicholas Carrs. I do not mean to denigrate those individual authors, rather to say that they produce a particular type of work.

 

Read the full editorial on The Guardian.

 

Key Steps to Writing a Book

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This post by Christy Heady originally appeared on her site on 4/15/15.

Aside from implementing good storytelling and following stellar punctuation rules, when a writer begins the process of writing a book and wanting a successful writing career he or she must keep a few points in mind. These points are not taught in school; rather, they are fruitful lessons I have learned along the way to becoming a best-selling author that I want to share with you.

 

#1. You must love what you do.

When I began writing my first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Making Money on Wall Street, I absolutely loved the topic. In fact, I loved it so much it helped me embrace the fact I lived in a tiny apartment with no air-conditioning and washed my hair in the kitchen sink since I did not have a shower and had only a pint-sized tub. I had a dream and a purpose and my love for that kept my focused and on toward financial success.

 

Read the full post, which includes four additional, specific steps with commentary, on Christy Heady’s site.

 

New Struggles in Self-Publishing

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This post by David Farland originally appeared on his site on 6/23/15.

I hesitate to mention problems with self-publishing. In some genres, such as romance or self-help books, the industry is doing great. But for those who are trying to sell fiction, it seems that the markets are contracting, and it appears that things will go from bad to worse.

If you’ve been self-publishing for the past few years, you probably remember the good old days. For example, a few years ago I put my novel The Golden Queen up as a free e-book for a week and forgot about it. I was going to mention on my social media what I had done, but seriously got busy with something else. Three days later, I got an email from someone who said, “Why don’t you take your free e-book down and let someone else have a shot at the #1 spot.” I’d given away 15,000 copies in three days, and had sold thousands of dollars in inventory on the other two books in the series.

Today, even getting readers to look at a free book is nearly impossible. People have seen so many promotions for bad books that they stay away in droves. In this past year alone, I’ve read that nearly three million e-books were created, and another three million are anticipated this year. With so much “white noise,” how is a good author to be heard?

 

Read the full post on David Farland’s site.

 

On Changing Book Titles And Covers: My Own Experience And How You Can Do It Too

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 4/28/15.

I’ve just been through a massive rebranding process: re-titling and re-covering the first 3 books in my ARKANE series, and updating the back matter for all the other books.

A hefty amount of work!

Here’s why and how, just in case you want to go through this sometime. It’s quite a long, confessional style of post. I’m ‘fessing up to my mistakes, so be gentle with your comments!

First up, here are the awesome new covers: Stone of Fire (previously Pentecost), Crypt of Bone (previously Prophecy) and Ark of Blood (previously Exodus), designed by the wonderful JD Smith Design.

New ARKANE covers

So, why change my fiction book titles anyway?

Basically, none of us know what the hell we’re doing when we start writing  🙂

Here’s how my first book title journey went.

In November 2009, I joined NaNoWriMo in an attempt to write something fictional. Amusingly, I videoed the process – here’s Day 1, and you can follow the whole journey here. The working title for the book on Day 1 was Morgan – and Morgan Sierra is still the name of my main character and alter-ego, so that hasn’t changed.

 

Read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

Kindle’s New Bookerly Font and Other Typography Features

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This post by Joel Friedlander originally appeared on his The Book Designer on 6/22/15.

Many ebook readers—and not just us typography nerds and designers, either—have complained about the limited font set provided with the major e-readers.

Considering the vast sums that have been spent on developing these devices, it’s always seemed odd to me that they would trumpet their e-reading devices and commitment to book readers, then ship a product that aims to fulfill these promises… but only in one of these fonts:

  • Baskerville
  • Caecilia
  • Georgia
  • Helvetica
  • Palatino

I’ve typeset books in Baskerville, but there’s Baskerville, then there’s Baskerville, a sturdy face with high stroke contrast and lovely long serifs, not the weak-tea version on the Kindle.

Now Amazon has put some work into upgrading both the font selection on its Kindle devices and apps, but also on other areas of typography that Kindle has historically fallen down on.

The rollout of these features seems to be happening slowly along Amazon’s product line, and it’s hard to tell which devices have received which upgrades.

On Amazon’s own site for the new Kindle PaperWhite, they list 5 new features:

 

Read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

Good Is The Enemy of Great- 5 Things Special Forces Taught Me

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This post by Bob Mayer originally appeared on his Write On The River blog on 6/20/15.

I’ve had varied experiences, especially in the military. Cadet at West Point, Infantry platoon leader, recon platoon leader, and then Special Forces A-Team leader and other position in Special Operations over the years. I experienced organizations at various levels, from bad to great.

However, the most dangerous place to be is ‘good’.

What good means is that you and/or your organization is doing well enough to get by. To accomplish the ordinary tasks. But in Special Forces our tasks were often extraordinary. Complacency could have fatal consequences.Voltaire is credited with saying: “Good is enemy of great.”

I’ve found this also to be true in my civilian career as a writer and CEO of Cool Gus. Here are some basic rules I learned in Special Operations and continually apply to avoid settling for good; and you can too:

1. Great is hard work. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. The one common core I saw in Spec Ops and in successful authors was they work damn hard. I watch people buying lottery tickets and think that’s what many wanna-be’s do with their career and their life. They hope luck will strike them; luck comes to those on top of the hill. Who climbed up there on their own.

 

Read the full post on Write On The River.

 

Understanding the Flashback—Bending Time as a Literary Device

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 6/15/15.

Last time we talked about flashbacks and why they ruin fiction. But, because this is a blog and I don’t want it to be 20,000 words long, I can’t address everything in one post. Today, we’re going to further unpack “the flashback.” I think we tend to use broad literary terms to encompass a lot of things that aren’t precisely the same things, and in doing this, we get confused.

In my POV, the term “flashback” is far too broad.

We can mistakenly believe that any time an author shifts time, that THIS is the dreaded “flashback” I am referring to and the one I (as an editor) will cut.

Not necessarily.

We need to broaden our understanding of the “flashback” because lumping every backwards shift in time under one umbrella won’t work.

My favorite example is the term “antagonist.” I’ve even been to conferences where experts used the terms “antagonist” and “villain” interchangeably as if they were synonyms, which is not the case. A villain is only one type of antagonist. It creates a false syllogism. Yes, all oranges villains are fruits antagonists, but not all fruits antagonists are oranges villains.

 

Read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

How to Write Character Reaction Patterns

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This post by David Wiseheart originally appeared on Character Secrets on 3/20/15.

Writing teachers, story coaches, and screenwriting gurus often say:

“Story comes from character.”

Or:

“Story is character.”

And that’s true.

Unfortunately, these writing teachers rarely go into detail about what that actually means.

Or how it works.

Well, I’m about to show you exactly how it works.

 

Master the Pattern, and You Master the Game

In a story, when a character is confronted with a major stress, they react.

How do they react?

Characters react to major stresses in ways that are both unique and predictable.

There are patterns.

I call them character reaction patterns.

If you know a character’s type, then you can know how they will tend to react to major stresses.

Knowing these patterns can help you to write or re-write your story.

If you’re outlining a plot, you can use these patterns to come up with new scenes. This can be a huge help in plotting your screenplay or novel.

 

Read the full post on Character Secrets.

 

How to Create a Believable Fictional Universe

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This post by Georgina Roy originally appeared on e-Books India on 6/11/15.

A fictional universe is the world where your story takes place. Your story can happen anywhere from prehistoric Earth, to a futuristic world filled with flying cars and funny colored aliens. Even if you decide to set up your story in modern day Earth, it is still a version of Earth that will exist only in your imagination. However, sometimes we can get carried away when creating our stories and come up with worlds that are so extravagant and extraordinary they cross the line of logic and become unbelievable. This is why there are some things that you, as the writer, have to think of when you’re creating your world.

 

1. Decide on a theme

What kind of a world do your characters inhabit? Modern day Earth, a fantasy world, or do they live in the distant future or outer space? This is important because not only do you have to find the way your world figures into the plot of your novel, but it will also determine your target audience and the genre of your book. The crucial thing to remember is that you have to stick with the theme throughout your book. The world building is always a mark of a great book, and that means that the theme has to be consistent on every page of your novel.

 

Read the full post, which includes four additional specific steps, on e-Books India.

 

How Indie Authors Can Make Two Categories Count On Amazon

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This post by Cate Baum originally appeared on Self-Publishing Review on 5/20/15.

Amazon made a decision sometime in the last two months or so to cut off new indie books to the five plus two categories allowed to all indie/self-published authors who had both paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. Why could this decision have been made, and how can authors make the most of the measly two categories now allowed when publishing on Kindle?

Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us

What happened? Maybe the mounting problems for authors who had trad-published, or had genre books in the last couple of years with categories forced a change. Publishing companies and indie authors on imprints and small presses with money riding on book campaigns were being drowned in self-publishers categorizing their books too loosely in ways to get seen – especially in the erotica genre. I talked about this as being a problem I foresaw Amazon reacting to, and was only two pitchforks from being burned at the stake for mentioning anything that could cause a vibration through the “freedom for writers everywhere” faction.

But hey, it happened as predicted, and very quietly, too.

While some authors were releasing up to eight books of erotica at the same time to flood book charts with their ‘brand,’ and categorized them as “Westerns” when their lover boy rode a horse, or “Crime Fiction” when the book featured a gangster type doing the bedding, Amazon was flooded with books that used to stay in their own little (adult) area – it became nigh impossible to even enter the YA Sci-Fi section of Amazon without a bevvy of bare chests and chiffoned thighs gracing the listing pages.

So the greedy few seemed to have spoiled it for the rest of us. Well done, kids!

 

Finding “The Two”

 

Read the full post on Self-Publishing Review.

 

A Golden Era for Young Readers: The Story Behind Little Golden Books

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This post by Rob Lammle originally appeared on Mental Floss on 6/12/15.

There’s a good chance you grew up reading the adventures of The Poky Little Puppy, Tootle, or Scuffy the Tugboat in the pages of Little Golden Books. But how much do you know about the story behind these beloved tales?

Before the introduction of Little Golden Books in 1942, children’s books weren’t necessarily made with children’s interests in mind. They were usually large volumes that were too difficult for young readers to handle or comprehend, and were awfully expensive at $2 to $3 each (that’s about $28 – $42 today). But George Duplaix of the Artist’s and Writer’s Guild, in partnership with Simon & Schuster Publications and Western Printing, wanted to change all that.

Duplaix thought the solution was small, sturdy, inexpensive books with fewer pages, simpler stories, and more illustrations so little kids could actually enjoy them. Western was already publishing a line for kids called Golden Books, so Duplaix and his team piggy-backed on those marketing efforts, calling the new line Little Golden Books.

The first 12 titles were released on October 1, 1942, at a price of only a quarter a piece. They were an instant success. After only five months on the market, 1.5 million copies had been sold and many titles were already in their third printing; by 1945, most were in their seventh printing. One of the keys to their sales success was the fact that they were available in unusual places, such as department stores, drug stores, and supermarkets. Busy parents could keep rambunctious children occupied while they ran errands, and not feel guilty about the additional 25 cents tacked onto their final bills.

 

Read the full post on Mental Floss.

 

How to Make Custom Images for Your Blog Posts Without Hiring a Designer

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This post by Neil Patel originally appeared on Quicksprout on 6/8/15.

The posts on this blog are typically 2,000 words long. Would you honestly read them if they were nothing but text? Sure, some of you would (and that’s amazing, thank you), but I could never blame anyone for not wanting to read a giant block of text.

This is why articles that include images get 94% more total views than articles that don’t.

Remember though, that stat is just an average. If you use images well, your traffic could increase even more.

It’s a win-win: you get more pageviews, and your readers get to enjoy reading more digestible content.

While social media isn’t the same as your blog posts, it illustrates the power of great images.

Posts on Facebook that include an image get 53% more likes than posts without an image. Additionally, they also make up 93% of the most engaging posts.

 

Read the full post, which includes 5 specific tips for making custom images, on Quicksprout.

 

“Let's Talk About Genre”: Neil Gaiman And Kazuo Ishiguro In Conversation

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This conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro originally appeared on New Statesman on 6/4/15.

The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are good for the economy.

Neil Gaiman’s New York Times review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel began a debate about the borders between fantasy and literary fiction. For a special issue guest-edited by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer​, the New Statesman brought the pair together to discuss genre snobbery and the evolution of stories.

Neil Gaiman Let’s talk about genre. Why does it matter? Your book The Buried Giant – which was published not as a fantasy novel, although it contains an awful lot of elements that would be familiar to readers of fantasy – seemed to stir people up from both sides of the literary divide. The fantasy people, in the shape of Ursula Le Guin (although she later retracted it) said, “This is fantasy, and your refusal to put on the mantle of fantasy is evidence of an author slumming it.” And then Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times reviewed it with utter bafflement. Meanwhile, readers and a lot of reviewers had no trouble figuring out what kind of book it is and enjoyed it hugely.

Kazuo Ishiguro I felt like I’d stepped into some larger discussion that had been going on for some time. I expected some of my usual readers to say, “What’s this? There are ogres in it . . .” but I didn’t anticipate this bigger debate. Why are people so preoccupied? What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?

NG I think if you were a novelist writing in 1920 or 1930, you would simply be perceived as having written another novel. When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, “Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic.”

 

Read the full conversation on New Statesman.

 

Advice For An Author Looking For A Literary Agent

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This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 5/20/15.

Until last week, I hadn’t stopped to think about how often I’m advising authors about how to deal with the publishing business. I would imagine this is something that most of us in the industry find ourselves doing very frequently. There are, after all, a lot of aspiring authors in the world and when one’s a friend, or a friend of a friend, they ask. And you try to help them.

As I wrote in an April post, I had assumed until very recently that an author couldn’t do herself any harm by self-publishing her work on her way to finding an agent or a publisher. When an agent I know and respect told an author I’d sent to him that he really found it hard to sell publishers already self-published books, it stopped me short. I sent out a query to a long list of agents and the consensus opinion that came back was that publishers are really uncomfortable picking up a book that has already made an appearance in the marketplace. (A deeper look at the results of this canvassing will be the subject of a future post.)

Although we all know stories of self-published books that went on to have fabulous runs with a publisher (“50 Shades of Gray” being the obvious example), it seems that most agents think that most publishers see the previous publishing history as a challenge. If the book didn’t do well, they don’t attribute it to poor or non-existent marketing. And if it did well, they sometimes wonder if the audience has been exhausted.

Obviously, there are both agents and editors who don’t think that way, but I was really surprised to learn that so many of them apparently do.

I would never attempt to advise an author on the techniques for self-publishing. That’s not what I know and there are many people, starting with our friend Jane Friedman (not the one from Open Road), who specialize in that (although she knows about finding agents and regular publishing too). But I have long had a formulation of how to recruit an agent which I passed along when asked.

 

Read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.

 

Can I (Successfully) Be Sued for My Scathing, Cruel, Factually Misleading (but Very Witty) Review of Your Book?

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This post by Mark Fowler originally appeared on Rights of Writers on 6/19/14.

In a television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the novelist Mary McCarthy was asked which writers she regarded as overrated. McCarthy singled out the playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman as “a bad writer, a dishonest writer,” and went on to say “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”

As Franklin Foer tells the story, “when Lillian Hellman heard the quip in her bed, she laughed. By the time her assistant arrived for work the next morning, Hellman had called her lawyer, and set in motion a $2.25 million libel suit against McCarthy.”

Did Hellman have a legal leg to stand on? I’ll come back to that question in a minute.

There’s no doubt that a scathing take-down of a book or movie or other work of art can provide a wicked source of pleasure to both the reviewer and her readers. Some deliciously disapproving book reviews may be found in this collection of pans, this one, this one (focusing on harsh assessments of literary classics), and this one (featuring caustic reviews by New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani). At least two books have chronicled the history of bookish slam pieces: The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem and Rotten Reviews Redux. And there is even a Hatchet Job of the Year award for the “best” worst review.

But can a negative review of a book or film or other creative work go too far and give rise to a successful legal claim against the reviewer? The answer: yes, but (thank heavens) rarely. To make sure your reviews don’t plunge you into legal hot water, you should bear in mind the sometimes fuzzy line between constitutionally protected opinion and legally actionable libel.

 

Read the full post on Rights of Writers.