genre fiction

Impatient Readers Lead to Rapid-fire Series Release

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This post by Sadie Mason-Smith originally appeared on the Melville House blog on 2/12/14.

On-demand services have not only changed the way we watch television shows, they’ve affected our expectations of all media. Instant gratification and binge-watching have affected the consumer model, and the publishing world is taking notice. Julie Bosman reports in The New York Times on a new trend in the industry: publishing release dates for series are getting shorter. Editors like Farrar, Strauss & Giroux’s Sean McDonald are catering to the ravening hordes of but-I-want-it-now readers by shrinking the release dates between installments from a year to a few short months.

According to McDonald, these readers are more than just Veruca Salt imitators—they’re scared. “You can end up with angry and perplexed fans,” he said. “I think people are more aware of series storytelling, and there is this sense of impatience, or maybe a fear of frustration. We wanted to make sure people knew that there were answers to these questions.”

That sound you hear in the distance is George R. R. Martin laughing diabolically. Probably while killing a beloved character. Fans of serials have long been subject to the perfectionist whims of their favorite authors. Who can forget J. K. Rowling’s extra months of work as each successive Harry Potter book took an incrementally longer time before release? Who, even now, is on the edge of their at-this-point-worn-down seat for the last installment in Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson biographies, a five-book project that has been in-progress since 1982?

 

Click here to read the full post on the Melville House blog.

 

2014: The Year Of Reading Women?

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This post by Zeljka Marosevic originally appeared on the Melville House Publishing site on 1/24/14.

Sometime last year, I pinned a sheet of paper above my desk with the title “Women Writers” and began forming a list of names of female writers that I had read whose novels I enjoyed, admired or found important. I did this because I had too often found myself reading literary criticism or having conversations about books in which every author mentioned was male. A communal, easy forgetfulness seemed to spread over the article’s writer and his reader, or over those taking part in the conversation, a coercive amnesia where we forgot that women had ever written books, that they might even be good, and that they could be discussed alongside books by men —and would hold their own— rather than in separate fenced-off conversations.

Last year was a bad year for women in literature. As we covered on MobyLives, figures were revealed that showed how male reviewers and authors vastly outnumbered their female counterparts across UK publications; only 8.7% of books reviewed in the LRB were by women. In the US, the New York Review of Books flaunted a boy’s-only bumper summer issue when, out of twenty seven contributors, only one was a woman (April Bernard reviewed Frank Bernard, and we mustn’t forget an archive piece from Joan Didion).

2014, the Guardian reports, is being declared the “Year of Reading Women”, owing to a few small but important examples of how readers and critics are considering their next read.

 

Click here to read the full post on Melville House Publishing.

 

Isabel Allende Thinks We Suck

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This post by Steve Hockensmith originally appeared on Inkspot on 2/12/14. From the post:

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the Friendsozoic Era — which is to say the 1990s — my pal Mo Ryan edited a music ‘zine (remember those?) called Steve Albini Thinks We Suck. I always loved that name. Steve Albini was, at the time, the go-to producer if you wanted to grunge up your rock’n’roll for the flannel-flaunting masses. He had what I recall as a surly, mouthy, bad-boy streak — sort of like Liam Gallagher if he’d been born in the States and knew how to spell. So it was easy to imagine him thinking many, many, many things sucked, even the wonderful and talented Mo Ryan. (Mo told me the real reason her ‘zine got its name around 1998 or 1999, which is why I can’t remember it now.)…

I haven’t thought about Steve Albini or the ‘zine named in his honor in a long, long time. But they came to mind this week when I saw some of my colleagues in the mystery world reacting to a dis from Isabel Allende. Allende, as you might know, is a highly successful purveyor of the sort of middlebrow storytelling Barnes & Noble stocks under “Fiction” and some people call “literature.” Perhaps having grown tired of being all literary or examining the endlessly fascinating subject which is herself (Allende’s written at least four memoirs, which seems excessive for anyone who’s not Winston Churchill), she recently made the puzzling decision to write a mystery.

I call it puzzling because Allende’s been promoting her mystery by talking about how much she doesn’t like mysteries.

 

Click here to read the full post on Inkspot.

 

How to Get your books into the right Categories and Sub-categories: Readers to Books/Books to Readers—Part Three

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This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her blog on 12/16/13.

Introduction:

Two years ago, I wrote a blog piece about the importance of using categories, keywords, and tags (which no longer exist) to make your books visible in the Kindle Store. A year later I wrote an update that expanded on this and discussed how having your book in the right categories could make free and discount promotions more effective. The basic argument I made hasn’t changed––that an author needs to understand how categories work in order to use them to improve the chance their books will be found by readers who are browsing in the Kindle store.

If you aren’t convinced of the importance of categories in improving discoverability—you might want to go back and skim through those two posts or just Google “discoverability and categories” to see the multiple posts on this topic. However, for most of you, it isn’t the importance of categories but how to get your books into the right categories that you are most interested in––and there have been a number of significant changes warranting a new update on this topic.

First, the number and kinds of categories and sub-categories in the Kindle Store have increased dramatically in the last year.

Second, the methods of getting a book into the correct categories and sub-categories have expanded, with keywords becoming particularly important.

Third, these changes have made the process even more confusing to authors.

Definitions:

Because these changes have resulted in a good deal of confusion in terminology—I am going to start here. While KDP has generally improved the experience for authors by introducing a whole plethora of help documents, the terminology used in these help documents and by KDP help staff is not always consistent. I will try and delineate some of these inconsistencies and provide some clarity below.

 

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

 

Considering A Collaboration

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This post, by L.J. Sellers, originally appeared on her site on 8/3/13.

Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, J.T. Ellison and Catherine Coulter, JA Konrath and each of his writer friends—everywhere you look, authors are teaming up.

The trend seems more prevalent than ever, and I suspect it’s because authors are operating more independently now and because they have to work so hard to reach new readers. Collaborating with another writer brings a whole new readership to each partner, at least for that story or series, and hopefully with spillover to other works.

I never thought I could work that closely with someone. I don’t even have a writing group because it feels too collaborative. Of course, I count on my beta readers (and editor) for feedback, but that’s after I’ve nailed down the main story.

But I was approached recently by a friend about doing a collaboration, and I surprised myself by being receptive to the idea. Now that I have an FBI agent with her own series, a collaboration that brings Agent Dallas together with another established protag seems like a productive idea.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on L.J. Sellers’ site.

 

Amazon Makes Life Easier For Authors of Historical & Literary Fiction

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This post, by David Gaughran, originally appeared on his website on 10/22/13.

There are lots of reasons why self-publishing success stories tend to concentrate around writers of “genre” fiction, but it’s a mistake to assume that success is impossible if you write literary fiction or historical fiction (which tends to get lumped in with literary fiction, even though it’s just another genre… like literary fiction!).

The first is demographics: romance and erotica readers were the first to switch to digital, followed by mystery and thriller fans, leading to the success stories of Amanda Hocking, Joe Konrath, and John Locke.

I remember SF/F authors complaining (back in 2011) that their readers hadn’t switched to e-books yet, casting jealous eyes at the outsized romance audience. But as readers did move across, we saw people like David Dalglish and BV Larson breaking out, and the rest of “genre” fiction soon followed.

The rise of “genre” self-publishing was also aided by the mistreatment of the midlist by large publishers: falling advances, worsening terms, and the shifting of the marketing burden onto the author’s shoulders. With bigger names jumping ship and striking out on their own, the increasing selection of quality self-published books at very low prices (and often exclusively available as e-books) acted as a strong pull factor for readers of genre fiction to switch to digital.

Non-fiction has been slower to go digital for a few reasons. First, technical limitations of e-book formats and the devices themselves have made the digitization of anything other than straight narrative text troublesome – even the minor technical challenge posed by something like footnotes has yet to be resolved in a satisfactory way.

On top of that, non-fiction authors tend to be treated a little better by publishers, especially in terms of advances – so there’s less of a push factor encouraging authors to self-publish. This means less big name authors dragging print readers to digital with low prices and digital exclusivity, and, thus, a smaller reader pool for non-fiction self-publishers.

The case of historical fiction and literary fiction is a little different. Weak digital sales from large publishers, and the relative lack of self-publishing success in these genres, has led some to worry about the future. But I think something else is going on here.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on David Gaughran’s site. dfaf

 

FBI 101 for Crime Fiction Writers: Interview with Scott Nelson

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This post, by A. M. Khalifa, originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 11/19/13.

Scott Nelson is the film industry’s leading technical expert on all matters FBI. Most recently he was Clint Eastwood’s main point of reference on J. Edgar, the historic biopic of the FBI’s founder. A former and highly decorated marine, Mr. Nelson rose to head the FBI’s public affairs office where he was instrumental in the creation of America’s Most Wanted, as well as convincing the filmmakers of the Silence of the Lambs to shoot on location at the FBI’s academy in Quantico, Virginia.

I sat down with Scott for a coffee and a chat near Westlake Village in Southern California, where he now runs a global security and risk management firm. I wanted to glean some valuable advice for crime fiction writers. This is is the first of a two-part interview. Part two will be posted on Saturday, November 23.

 

A.M. Khalifa: During your time heading the FBI’s public affairs office, did you ever work with crime fiction writers, and if so, what are they typically trying to research?

Scott Nelson: Yes. Typically crime fiction writers want to know how it works in the real world and then how those basic techniques and tactics can be tweaked to create more interest and more drama. Everyone is looking for that new story, and as times change that new story will always emerge. Plus, old stories can be retooled to present new facts and new views.

 

AMK: As an FBI insider, what is the number one misconstrued notion about the Bureau that you would like to set the record straight on here, once and for all?

SN: That the FBI always screws over the “locals” (local and state law enforcement). Simply not so. The Bureau works hand in glove with state and local officers and provides ongoing valuable training, research, services and support. In fact, many joint operations are run every day.

 

AMK: However, I think readers and viewers LOVE it when the smart, omnipotent FBI agent slights the incompetent locals and pulls rank and jurisdiction. They feel secure of a positive outcome when a favorably drawn FBI agent is involved. Do you agree?

SN: Yes, but likewise there is a tendency to show cops merely as doughnut eaters. And therefore, many cops – particularly suits in the front office – are quite defensive and constantly trying to prove their worth. I’ve been blown off on many occasions by locals who do resent the FBI and their own lot in life.

 

AMK: How accessible is the FBI as an organization to independent authors reaching out to it for technical information, and what specific mechanisms exist to deal with such requests?

 

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

Scotland?

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Halloo!

It’s nothing to do with writing — yet; I’m hoping for inspiration — but I’d like to ask if there are any other Scots here, and if so, if any of you are going to the Gathering of the Clans this summer.