Hand Wringing

Yikes. Just read a pub contract w/ indefinite term that withholds 20% reserve _annually_ & doesn't release it till book is OOP. Run away.

— Victoria Strauss (@victoriastrauss) March 3, 2016

This week was a turbulent one in the blogosphere.

There was angst about the U.S elections, Angst about Author Solutions, Angst about Mike Shatzkin’s blog.

General Angst everywhere.

Phillip Jones of the Bookseller, finally got Andrew Phillips of Penguin Random House to talk about Author Solutions. Andrew laid out one side of the story where PRH thought Author Solutions was a good idea. 'Unfortunately a few authors have disagreed.' 

‘A few,’ spluttered the leading commenter’s. With class actions happening, every major writer organisation’s complaints ignored and a long list of complaints from writers who have lost large sums of money there was an outpouring of disgust over the article. If you weren’t sure about Author Solutions and their imprints for big publishers this is required reading.

Staying on the subject of assisted publishing Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware tried to contact author Steve Alten. She was concerned about the look of his new publishing venture to help other authors, but had no success until Chuck Wendig wrote a blog about it.  What is the definition of a vanity press? Chuck laid it out and then there was the response from Steve. The tennis match of eyeballs on the responses from each side played out all over social media.

Mike Shatzkin, publishing futurist, published a blog this week where he talked about changing his mind on what is happening with Agency and print sales. Porter wrote a piece discussing this. It is all very murky. Has Amazon put one over the publishers by getting them to agree to Agency conditions where they set the prices? Have publishers’ tactic of inflating eBook prices until they were more expensive than buying a print copy helped print sales and booksellers or is it all an elaborate lie. Are adult Colouring In books skewing what is really happening in print sales?

If you wanted to try your hand at publishing a colouring in book Joanna Penn has a comprehensive interview with Meg Cowly on how to do it.

Novel Approach, a book review blog, discovered that Amazon has pulled all their reviews and they are legit. They can’t get them back and Amazon won’t talk to them.

We need some good news!

Susan Kaye Quinn breezed in with a great post on finding joy in our writing. This saved us from being overcome with despair.

In the Craft Section,

Why scripts are rejected- Becca Puglisi

Scrivener and the proficient writer- Joanna Penn

Take 30 minutes to fix your novel- Bookmark

Reader’s response to the heroes’ journey- Martina Boone- Bookmark

Hacking my writing process- Kameron Hurley

1 tweak to write original characters- K M Weiland-Bookmark

Character dialogue tips

In the Marketing Section,

7 must do tasks after you finish the manuscript

Marketing after you get the rights back. - Bookmark

Sins and virtues of email marketing- Copyblogger-Bookmark

How to make eBook design count- comprehensive by DBW- Bookmark

Building your author brand.

To Finish,

Nosy Crow Publishers wrote about how they select books to publish. They are a nimble bunch in London.

Top Agent Kristen Nelson wrote about her first year under the new request regime of asking for the first 10 pages up front. If the authors were sweating over the query letter- Kristen was finding that the first ten pages really showed if authors knew their craft. Angst in a good way over this blog.

Maureen
@craicer

Tweet from Victoria this afternoon... scary.

Is It Goodwill?

This week in the international childrens publishing community everyone was talking about the genre slap that we took when Kent University (UK) decided that Childrens Writing was not literary enough to teach seriously... this followed the sacking of the Times Children’s Book reviewer, in a budget cut. The children’s writing community in the UK wrote a letter signed by 425 writers and librarians to the Times expressing their outrage at this. Childrens writers around the world are facing the continual disparagement of what they do so there was lots of agreement when Keren David wrote this blog piece. There is a beautifully put comment on it from New Zealand’s Maria Gill who summed up our feelings here pretty well.

As the fallout continues over Learning Media and the sales of back lists etc etc, anybody who has got an email with new contract terms in it please check in with NZ Society of Authors before you sign anything.

Be aware that increasingly publishing contracts are now including tricky little phrases such as ‘all rights in perpetuity’ and ‘Worldwide’ and last month Writer Beware commented on a contract that had ‘Universe wide.’ Check over this handy book contract clause explain-all.

Bob Mayer has been looking at the traits of sucessful writers these days and it comes down to the fact that they are ‘Outliers.’ This is a really interesting article.

Continuing in this vein is a great post by C J Lyons who is probably the most sucessful Hybrid author out there. How has she juggled her writing career stradling both sides of the fence...she went and built a new paddock.

Bibliocrunch has some tips if you want to look into self publishing.

Phillip Jones of FutureBook has been looking at the slap dealt to the science publishing community from a Nobel Prize winner about the elitist nature of publishing journals... The Open Access of scholarly work is the big talking point in the academic community at the moment.

DigitalBookWorld is hosting a webinar on Rights Marketing and Management. Check it out.

Author newsletters...How do you do them and what use are they. This is a nifty bookmark worthy post giving you the low down.

Publishing Perspectives is taking issue with The Best Of 2013 Book lists...which are appearing all over the web at the moment. One ofthe more comprehensive book lists I’ve seen is BookRiot’s. At least I have heard of some of the books.

In the Craft section,

Susan Kaye Quinn on Brainstorming Your Book. This is a bookmark it post.

Jodie Renner has pro tips on character description.

Writersinthestorm has a How to write like the wind...

Kirsten Lamb on character duality traits.

Sarah Juckes has discovered a nifty website to help youuntangle your plot.

There are three stellar articles from Jami Gold.

4 tips that solve 99% of your writing problems

Subtext when your characters are liars

Fix 4 common problems with The Emotion Thesaurus (Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s amazing book)

In the Marketing section,

Joel  Friedman has a nifty template for anyone wanting to do a dust jacket.

Julie Hedlund has been doing a kick starter for her picture book which became funded yesterday. Take a look at how she broke it down and what she offered.

6 books every marketer needs to read. I have read some of them and they are very interesting even if you are not a marketer.

To Finish,

‘Tis the season to get gifts for yourself  (or the writer in your life...) Here we have Chuck’s Ten gifts for writers updated from when he asked people to kidnap Neil Gaiman.

K M Weiland has the top 10 gifts for writers...(not as extreme...) and

Writer Unboxed has bypassed the gift list and gone straight to New Years resolutions for writers...

Spread the Goodwill!

maureen

Pic from Amazon (5* book on visual fantasy writing)