Divas on Dialogue: Accents and Dialects

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This post by Janine Savage originally appeared on Publishing A Book Is An Adventure on 4/15/14.

Accents and Dialects

Who doesn’t love listening to an accent or an entertaining dialect, especially one delivered by a sexy model or actor? Accents and dialects make people more interesting, probably because the sound is interesting to listen to and offers a fresh perspective to the words being spoken. It also adds another layer to the character, makes them feel authentic, and gives clues to the background of the speaker.

But does that same auditory experience translate well to the written word? Depends on how you handle it. As a writer you depend on the reader to do a lot of things while they read your book. One of those things is how the characters sound in their heads. This is as individual as the readers themselves are. Just as every reader has an image in his or her head of the characters, there is a voice to match. So is simply saying, “he spoke with a heavy Italian accent” enough for the reader to go on if you don’t infuse that character’s dialogue with special spellings to show the accent or dialect? Yes and no.

One of the issues with using accents and dialects is stereotyping. Perception can lead one reader to think the accent or dialect is authentic while another is insulted by it. And when phonetic spelling is used to illustrate an accent, the reader could find it too difficult to decipher if it is overused. This becomes a distraction and may cause the reader to abandon your book if it’s too difficult to read or comes across as gimmicky. I’ve abandoned a number of books for this reason.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Is An Adventure.

 

The Writer As Editor

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This post by Karen Ball originally appeared on the Steve Laube Agency blog on 1/30/13.

As we saw in my post last week, there are any number of ways a manuscript can go wrong. Hard enough to write a novel, but then to have to dig in and edit it yourself? That’s especially tough. So here are some tips to help you be the best editor you can be.

Don’t let the editor out to play too soon

Writing and editing are very different functions for the brain. Writing is a creative process; editing, logical and detail-oriented. When writing, we need to let ourselves forget the rules and coax the story to life. When editing, we must embrace the rules as a solid foundation to help us strengthen what’s landed on the page. I’ve seen so many writers almost drive themselves crazy by trying to edit as they write, which ends up making them second-guess everything. And freezes the story in its tracks.

Puts me in mind of one of my favorite pens (pictured below). It’s a two-tip pen—black ink at one end, red at the other. The body of the pen is made of two colors of wood, one with black tones, one with red. One end for writing, the other for editing. The pen works great—so long as I only use one end at a time! Trying to edit and write at the same time would be like grabbing the pen at both ends: totally ineffectual.

If you’re the kind of writer who can edit as you write, kudos. But for the rest of us, let’s give ourselves a break. Don’t do that. Rather, just WRITE. Keep the editor safely closed away until the writing is done.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Steve Laube Agency blog.

 

How I Got An Awesome Cover Design from 99 Designs, and Why I'll Think Twice Before Using it Again

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This post by Livia Blackburne originally appeared on her A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing blog on 12/13/13.

Last week, I mentioned using 99 Designs for Poison Dance’s cover. I love the book cover I ended up with, but I’m hesitant to use the service again. A few people asked me to elaborate.

Here’s a basic rundown of how it works. It’s a contest site, where customers hold contests for artists to compete in.  The winner gets the prize money — everybody else gets valuable life experience. There are three award levels you can choose. The greater though award, the more designers you will have entering. I chose the least expensive package: the bronze package for $299. Here’s my design brief listing my specifications.

After initiating the contest, you go into the first round, where designers submit different cover concepts and you offer feedback in the form of comments and star ratings. As the contest progresses, you start narrowing down the field, until at the end of the first round (about 4 days I think?), you name up to six finalists. Then, you begin a second round as the finalists continuing to refine and rate designs. At the end (3 days?), you choose a winner. If you want to see my top six designs, you can take a look at the poll I created here for people to help me rate the options. Then you choose the winner, make any last tweaks that you need to, and receive your design.

Here are pros of using 99 designs:

1.  Fast

Nowadays, popular cover designers can be booked for months. With 99 designs, you can finalize the design in a little more than a week. (Although you can still get delays at the very end, while your winning artist makes any last changes you request.)

 

Click here to read the full article on A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing.

 

25 Samuel Beckett Quotes That Sum Up the Hilarious Tragedy of Human Existence

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This post by Alison Nastasi originally appeared on Flavorwire on 4/13/14.

We’d like to wish avant-garde icon Samuel Beckett a happy birthday, but something tells us he’d take issue with that. Beckett’s words are tender blows to the heart — superbly morose, always acerbic, and unrelentingly pessimistic. The novelist and playwright had a lot to say about the absurdities of modern life and the tragicomic nature of human existence. Taking quotes from his prolific oeuvre and other sources, celebrate Beckett’s birthday by revisiting his thoughts on the boredom and suffering of being.

“The only sin is the sin of being born.”

“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.”

“I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

Social Media, Book Signings & Why Neither Directly Impact Overall Sales

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 4/14/14.

One of my AWESOME on-line pals posted something troublesome on my Facebook page. Apparently there is a recent article in a major writing magazine that declares social media does not sell books and, in a nutshell, isn’t worth the effort. I’ll warn you guys ahead of time that I went hunting for the article—at the last remaining Barnes & Noble within a 25 mile radius of my home—and couldn’t find said article (and have asked Kim to get me the specific issue). But, since this type of commentary is prevalent enough in the blogosphere, I feel I can address the overall thesis accurately enough.

Social Media Was NEVER About Selling Books Directly—Who KNEW?

I’ve been saying this for about ten years, because the idea of using social circles for sales is NOT new. About ten years ago, I recognized that social media would soon be a vital tool for writers to be able to create a brand and a platform before the book was even finished. This would shift the power away from sole control of Big Publishing and give writers more freedom. But, I knew social media could not be used for direct sales successfully.

How?

When I was in college, every multi-level-marketing company in the known world tried to recruit me. I delivered papers and worked nights most of my college career. Needless to say, I was always on the lookout for a more flexible job that didn’t require lugging fifty pounds of paper up and down three flights of apartment stairs at four in the morning.

I’d answer Want Ads in the paper thinking I was being interviewed for a good-paying job where I could make my own hours. Inevitably it would be some MLM company selling water filters, diet pills, vitamins, prepaid legal services, or soap.

And if I sat through the presentation, they fed me. This meant I sat through most of them.

What always creeped me out was how these types of companies did business. First, “target” family and friends to buy said product (and hopefully either sign them up to sell with you or at least “spread the word” and give business referrals). Hmmmm. Sound familiar?

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

The Best Time NOT To Self Publish Is…(Never)

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This post by Marcy Goldman originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies on 4/9/14.

There are so many op-eds these days on when or if to self-publish but more so, features on the inferiority of self-published works just by virtue of fact they are self-published. This premise is applied even if the self-publishing author has the budget, foresight and professionalism to engage all manner of expert editors, proof readers, formatters, designers and thoroughly research the distributing and promotion of his/her work, the resultant book will be very bad. Worse, it will be amateur in content and looks.

There’s also an assumption (somewhat fear, vs. empirically based) that without sufficient social media or platform, books (even great ones) won’t get noticed. I’ve seen a zillion writerly blogs with this headline: If you publish it who will find it/you? This suggests that Shakespeare (et al, Dan Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, JD Salinger, James Patterson, Ayn Rand) without benefit of Twitter, Facebook and Instragram or a YouTube book trailer of Othello, would never have been discovered. This is to further suggest that we as authors, creators, publishers and readers actually believe form trumps content. That means greatness, is a deux et machninas/medium-is-the-message is a fail from the get-go and a Pulitzer would never percolate to a deserved level of consciousness and find a collective of readers who know a good thing (or alternatively, what they want) when they find it – however they find it. But trust me (and the author of 50 Shades of Grey), they do and will find it.

What astounds me in the vast acreage of articulated opinions on these issues is a few-fold.

For one thing, there’s a passion, even a nervous derision or tempered contempt or dismissiveness offered to self-published authors in most of the opinion pieces I’ve read. Although I am Canadian, it is a divide akin to Tea Party-ers and Democrats, i.e. it’s a visceral thing.

 

Click here to read the full post on Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies.

 

Give That Piece A Second Chance

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 4/10/14.

In the past, I have advocated for fewer imprints. Allow me to reverse course as I suggest a new imprint idea that should be added at every major publisher. Call it Resurrection or Second Chance or Renewal. The idea is simple: Publishers are sitting on piles of quality material that they paid good money for. Some of those investments didn’t pay off. But it may not have been the fault of the text. Give that piece a second chance.

Self-published authors do this all the time (though probably not as often as they should). If a digital book isn’t selling well, there’s minimal cost and zero risk in repackaging the work and giving it a second go. Every editor has a list of books a mile long that they truly believed in, loved to death, but didn’t quite make a splash. Too often, this is blamed on the book or on consumers. Nearly as often, it is the wrong cover art, the wrong metadata, the wrong blurb, the wrong title, or simply the wrong time.

For the cost of cover art and an upload, a piece of valuable property can be brought out of the vault and sent out to customers. I imagine a spirited meeting once a month over coffee and scones, where editors can make their case for a book at least two years old that didn’t sell as expected. Perhaps they would want to look primarily at books for which they paid large advances, as the earnings are already in the red (so more of what is made would be kept in-house). These are probably the books they cared dearly about when they first saw them. Another $5,000 for a digital-only release is a drop in the bucket.

 

Click here to read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Literature Helps Explain The World To Me

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This post by Aasim Akhtar originally appeared on The News on Sunday on 4/13/14.

A literary agent in France, Marc Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting

Good looks, comic brilliance, and career success have not prevented Marc Parent from doing what he does best: living life as an emotional basket case. More riddled with pain than an arthritic joint, Parent is to publishing what Edvard Munch was to painting — the ultimate scream.

Marc Parent has been working in international publishing for 28 years in the wake of his studies in French and Comparative Literatures at L’Ecole Superieure Normale and at the College de France in Nanterre and Paris, and at Columbia University, NYC. For the last 10 years, he has been a publisher of foreign fiction and non-fiction at Editions Buchet/Castel in France, where he put together a major Indian and Pakistani catalogue of writers, including Daniyal Mueenuddin and Padmasambhava’s Tibetan Book of the Dead.

In May 2013, he started one-of-a-kind literary agency, India Maya Literary in Paris representing writers from all around the globe, with a special focus on fiction and non-fiction writers from India and Pakistan.

His publishing behind him, Parent holed up in Beach Luxury Hotel in Karachi on the occasion of KLF 2014 summing up his motives for the work as an effort to use thoughts about undoing the buttons of the ego to gorge out a proposition of his own.

Before his retreat, TNS tracked him down on the lawns facing the creek for an update. Unassuming and frail, he was nonetheless exuberant. Excerpts follow:

 

Click here to read the full post on The News on Sunday.

 

The Rise of E-Books and a Shrinking Library Catalog

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This post by Kate Rosow Chrisman originally appeared on Consumer Eagle on 4/7/14.

E-reading is on the rise, according to a January report by the Pew Internet project. Fully 50 percent of adults own a tablet or e-reader, and two out of five public libraries lend e-readers. But while libraries own their e-readers, the same can’t be said of the digital books on their virtual shelves. As a result, library patrons face long wait times to borrow what are essentially collections of bits and bytes.

Most local libraries purchase licensing agreements to e-books through a distributor. The purchasing agreements typically stipulate a time frame or number of uses. For example, a book may only be loaned out 26 times or for one year before it disappears from the library’s catalog. Often, the prices for these books are unreasonably high, according to James LaRue, CEO of LaRue Associates and former director of the Douglas County Library outside of Denver, Colo.

For a new bestseller, “You can buy [the print edition] as a consumer for $12.99, you can buy it for $9.99 as an e-book, but [publishers] are charging libraries for $84 for that book and only one person can use it at a time,” said LaRue.

For consumers, the hidden relationship between library and publisher is having a direct impact on access to materials. Avid reader Hilary Kennedy uses her local Washington, D.C. library to borrow e-books. “The wait list [for e-books] is ridiculously frustrating, because often the queue is 142 people long. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s a virtual book and the technology is there to distribute it to everyone,” she said. Moreover, it’s “aggravating when the library doesn’t have the e-book at all,” she said.

 

Click here to read the full post on Consumer Eagle.

 

Tarnished Silver or Wyoming-Gate – Silver Publishing Owner Has Allegedly Fled The Country

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This post by AJ Llewellyn originally appeared on his site on 4/10/14.

It has been all over the Internet for approximately two years that Silver Publish, LLC, is a company in deep distress doing business in an unorthodox manner…its sole owner, Lodewyk Deysel, AKA gay romance author Leiland Dale, may have started with good intentions but quickly began not paying staff and authors, telling one lie after another.

And now, things have crashed completely.

I was the one who tracked down a former employee who told me that Lodewyk Deysel has fled. He went to South Africa on Monday. She took him to the airport. She had no idea this was going on. It was a fluke I tracked her down just now. She said he called her Saturday midnight. He told her he needed to leave town in a hurry. She sold his RV for him yesterday and had listed his TV on her Facebook wall – a TV that he bought out of authors’ earnings.

I begged her to take the listing down because she was aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. She said the TV was already sold.

She was not concerned about the people he has defrauded. In fact she was very defensive. I was enraged to see her boating about the kindle fire “a friend” gave her and –

She even lied to me about the day he left. Look at her post, “chlling with my bestie at the airport”

I wonder which friend that might have been?

She aided and abetted a criminal. She sold his stuff on his Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/alisani.brazil?fref=ts

I called the police in her hometown of Harristown Township, Michigan, to report the crime. Dispatcher #31 would not help. He told me to call my local police. That I had to follow proper procedure.

“Pre owned Mitsubishi 60″ dlp TV in perfect condition!! $350. Only 1.5 year old!!!”

That TV and the RV are items that should have been sold for the authors.

He has moved out of his house and his stuff is gone. Goodbye royalties. He told her he has shut the company down.

As of this moment he is pretending to one staffer via cell phone that he is still in Michigan. She has now been informed otherwise.

He is GONE.

 

Click here to read the full, very lengthy post (and get the full history of Silver Publishing’s owner Lodewyk Deysel), on AJ Llewellyn’s site.

 

The Benefits of a Style Sheet

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This post by Jen Matera appeared as a reprint on ePublish A Book on 4/8/14.

Some authors write according to an outline, and others have a less-organized series of events they want to describe. There are authors who write their scenes sequentially, no matter how great or small, and those who write major scenes first and minor scenes last. I’ve even known one writer who wrote all her sex scenes first—she said they were the most fun—and then built the rest of the story around them.

But what most writers have in common is that they keep some kind of notes about their story, characters, plot, timeline, and whatnot. These notes, no matter how informal, are what editors use as a foundation for your story’s style sheet.

So… what’s a style sheet? It’s your editor’s notes about your novel—the place where every character’s name, physical description, relation to other characters is noted. But that’s not all. Not by a long shot. There are basically two types of information kept on a style sheet: content and format. Details that refer to your story line, your characters, your setting, your era, etc., are considered content information. Information regarding spelling, punctuation, and grammar is considered format. But the differentiation doesn’t really matter, as long as most of it is recorded somewhere.

Content:

• Character names—for every character named in the novel. Yes, even Sam the driver who was in one scene. We have no idea if he’ll show up again in book three, so he goes on the list.

• Physical description, including any descriptions—eye color, hair color, general build, and anything that’s noted as standing out. No author wants her lead’s eye color changing mid-story.

 

Click here to read the full post on ePublish a Book.

 

Write Your Thriller In Chapters: 10 Tips For Greater Productivity

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This post by Robert Chazz Chute originally appeared on his Chazz Writes site on 5/4/11.

There’s no one way to write a novel. I do, however, have ten suggestions to make it go easier and faster:

1. Outline. Have some idea where you’re going and what the destination might be. It’ll save you time doubling back from dead ends. Believe me, I’ve written myself into cul-de-sacs and it’s a time suck no one can afford. (No, you’re not married to the outline and you don’t have to go OCD with the Roman numeral outline you learned in grade eight. I’m trying to increase your productivity and enhance your creativity, not shackle it.)

2. If you outline, you don’t have to write your story in sequence. With an outline, you already have the beats, the bases you have to touch as you tell your story. If you’re not feeling very inspired one day, no big deal. Focus on the high points of your outline on the days you don’t start off “in the mood.” Bonus benefit: you’ll get all your sex scenes written first.

3. Write each chapter as if it’s a short story. Your novel has a beginning, middle and end. So should your chapters. I often see substandard chapters which finish without the pulls of intrigue, a cliffhanger or a bang. Some writers reason that if they make the larger story interesting, they can afford to have a chapter or two that isn’t compelling. It does sound reasonable. It’s also wrong. Tension has one direction: up. There are way too many great books to read (and a million other things to do) so, for many readers, you bore them, you lose them. Sure, you’ve made this sale, but they won’t be burnt again.

 

Click here to read the full post on Chazz Writes.

 

Tom Weldon: 'Some say publishing is in trouble. They are completely wrong'

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This post by Jennifer Rankin originally appeared on The Guardian UK / The Observer site on 4/5/14.

Ahead of the London Book Fair, the UK head of Penguin Random House insists his industry has coped with the digital revolution better than any other

The indie booksellers are shutting up shop, authors struggle to make a living, and more than 60% of 18-to-30-year-olds would rather watch a DVD than get their nose in a book. But as the publishing world gathers at the annual London Book Fair this week, one of the UK’s leading publishers thinks the notion of the book industry in crisis is just a cliched old story.

“Some commentators say the publishing industry is in enormous trouble today. They are completely wrong, and I don’t understand that view at all,” says Tom Weldon, UK chief executive of Penguin Random House, one of the biggest players in Britain’s book world.

As an up-and-coming publisher, he persuaded a teenage chef called Jamie Oliver to sign a book contract. He gets to edit Jeremy Paxman‘s prose and read the latest Ian McEwan manuscript. And since last July he has been at the helm of the UK division of the world’s biggest publishing house, after a mega-merger brought together Penguin, Random House and their 15,000 writers.

While a recent Booktrust survey showing that reading for pleasure is declining among young people might lead some execs to reach for the chablis, Weldon is convinced book publishers are doing better than other creative industries in adapting to a digital world.

“In the last four years, Penguin and Random House have had the best years in their financial history,” he says. “Book publishers have managed the digital transition better than any other media or entertainment industry. I don’t understand the cultural cringe around books.”

 

Click here to read the full post on The Guardian UK / The Observer.

 

LBF’s Digital Minds: The Golden Age or End of the Book?

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This post by Roger Tagholm and Edward Nawotka originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 4/8/14.

The Digital Minds conference in London took a philosophical bent, questioning is this “golden age for publishing or the end of the book?”

Copernicus, Ptolemy, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Willard Quine (don’t worry…he was a US philosopher and logician) were all name-checked in a presentation at yesterday’s Digital Minds that was as abstract as the speaker’s hair. Bill Thompson from the BBC Archives gave a philosophical masterclass on what we mean when we refer to a book and how the print and digital versions are very different animals, one passive, the other active.

“A [print] book sits there. It will contain the same words every time you open it. A book is outside the stream. Like a neutrino [sic: it was that sort of presentation], it rarely interacts with the world or interferes with the thoughts of even a single reader. This is its merit and its damnation…It is printed, dead, done with. Furniture.”

An ebook, he continued, is a file, “and because it’s just a file an ebook is never finished, an ebook is never cleanly separated from the rest of the flow of bits, an ebook is active, part of a wider ecosystem.”

Thompson thinks the industry needs to find a new paradigm because at the moment “publishers, agents and authors still act as if printed books are the center of the universe, and all other forms of publishing revolve around the printed, bound text.

 

Click here to read the full post on Publishing Perspectives.

 

Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book)

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This post by Rebecca Makkai originally appeared on Ploughshares on 3/7/14.

This is the story of Todd Manly-Krauss, the world’s most irritating writer. He’s a good enough guy in real life (holds his liquor, fun at parties, writes a hell of a short story)—but give the guy a social media account, and the most mild-mannered of his writer friends will turn to blood lust.

Okay, so he’s not a real writer. Except that he is. At times I fear he’s me.

Because I do struggle for balance with social media. I’m supposed to use it to promote my work (it’s not just a Twitter account, it’s a platform, dammit), and if many of the highlights of my life are writing-related, I naturally want to share those. But then I think of how I might come off to someone who’s struggled for years to publish that first story. Or how I must seem when I’m the only writer (the only self-promoter, even) on someone’s feed. And I wonder if I’m someone’s own personal Todd Manly-Krauss.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.