Matt Haig: ‘People like your books more if other people like them’ Photo: Canongate
Novelist Matt Haig had an insightful and amusing list of things he has learned after ten years as a published author in The Telegraph:
Matt Haig: 30 things that every writer should know
Definitely worth a read if you’re a writer.
This post goes out to all those writers hoping to land a traditional publishing contract:
Hope Laughs by Peter Marinacci
This comes (with permission) from one of my favorite web comics, Wombania. Seems somehow apropos to post during NaNoWriMo 8^)
playing tag, hair aflutter (Photo credit: cafemama)
I just got “tagged” by Vikki of The View Outside with the Work In Progress Challenge. I’m supposed to answer the following ten questions about my Work In Progress (WIP).
Like Vikki, I don’t have a WIP per se. That is, I haven’t starting writing. It’s still in the planning stage. But I’ll tell you what I can about it, hopefully without giving too much away.
Hydra Continue reading
Let’s Write a Short Story! by Joe Bunting
Joe Bunting, of the well-known writing blog The Write Practice, recently published the e-book Let’s Write a Short Story!. I agreed to review an advance review copy (and my apologies, Joe, for being so late with the review; life conspired to keep me from writing it until now, let alone finishing my short story WIP).
The purpose of this book is to help writers to write short stories and get them published. It’s a short book, only 153 pages in the PDF I received. But it’s packed full of useful information to get beginning writers on the fast track to short story publication.
The book begins with a reality check: some statistics on the low acceptance rates of submissions to major American literary magazines. But it goes on to give eight good reasons we should write short stories anyway.
Next, short stories are defined by giving four main attributes they generally share, and three things they are not. This is followed by some discussion of how to get published by literary magazines. Continue reading
Amazon (Photo credit: edgeplot)
I’ve been too busy with a family wedding and a staycation for a proper post. But since I’ve written previously about the Dorchester Publishing bankruptcy, I wanted to mention this news: Amazon Publishing buys 1000 titles from Dorchester.
The best news for the authors involved is that Amazon is going to pay the authors their back royalties. This is about the best case scenario for these authors. Amazon could probably have negotiated to avoid this if they wanted to (they were the only bidder).
I’m sure this will buy Amazon much goodwill. I’m curious to see if there’s any way that the anti-Amazon crowd can spin this into something negative. I don’t see how, but they can be quite creative.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, Massachusetts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Another publisher bankruptcy. I saw this last Friday in this post on the Passive Voice blog: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Enters Bankruptcy Process.
The article blames the bankruptcy on debt from leveraged buyouts in 2006 and 2007. It seems they were in trouble almost right away, having temporarily stopped acquiring new books in 2008. No mention of e-books or self-publishing playing a role.
This also seems a bit unusual in that a Chapter 11 deal was pre-negotiated with over 70% of senior lenders and bondholders (those with first dibs on assets in a liquidation) to convert their $3.1B debt to equity. I suspect the “negotiation” was along the lines of “your only alternative is to take five cents on the dollar in a liquidation” (they have $135M cash on hand, 4.4% of their debt; not sure of other assets but the lawyers and accountants would chew up a large chunk).
No word on what their current shareholders think of this massive dilution in their investment. But again, it’s likely a case of “you can take a haircut or a beheading.” Continue reading
Lists of academic journals (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Amazon’s disruption of traditional publishing has been has been covered in the press and blogosphere ad nauseam. But a less visible, though equally disruptive, change is happening in another area of traditional publishing: academic publishing.
The traditional academic publishers, such as Elsevier have had nice little scam business model going for them. University professors and graduate students conduct research, often paid for by a combination of government funding, student tuition and grants from charitable organizations. They publish their results in peer-reviewed journals and receive nothing in return. These journals are then sold back to the same universities at outrageous prices, reportedly as much as $40,000 per year for a single journal subscription, running into the millions for a university library.
Amazon (Photo credit: edgeplot)
I want to talk today about Amazon and how it exercises its self-interest.
There’s been a lot of ranting discussion about Amazon lately. Various news articles and blog posts more or less accuse them of being evil for, among other things:
Clay Shirky at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am paraphrasing the eminent Professor Clay Shirky in his post on the Findings.com blog: - How We Will Read: Clay Shirky. The bulk of the post is about his view of social reading and annotations (and seems intended to promote Findings.com). But his view of publishing is what really caught my attention:
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
Coincidentally, shortly after finishing my post on the impact of publisher bankruptcy on authors, I saw this post from The Passive Voice (which I highly recommend): Dorchester Publishing Closes Its Doors”. Talk about timing!
