Showing posts with label all hallows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label all hallows. Show all posts

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Trick Or Treat



Happy All Hallows Eve,
A couple of years ago Young Adult writers decided to hand out scary books to trick or treaters...and it has gained a following amongst the writing community in the countries that celebrate Halloween as a cultural festival. All Hallows Read...go to your local second hand bookstore...buy up ghostly children’s books and R L Stines...and hand them out.

This week in the publishing blogosphere there was a flutter as Larry Kirshbaum announced he was going back to agenting after heading up Amazon’s print publishing operation. Larry was up against it, when he was hired two years ago as all the bookstores holding onto deals with publishers decided they wouldn’t stock Amazon printed books. Traditional Publishing pundits have taken a ‘We Won Against The Mighty ‘Zon’ attitude but others aren’t so sure... Anyway you look at it, the authors are the ones suffering with poor print sales and no exposure to the bookstore browser. If the Mighty ‘Zon ever works out distribution into the bookstores for print books... the game will be changed.

In the blogosphere it is NaNoWriMo time and tips abound for how to tackle the month where everyone tries to write their 50,000 word opus. Editors and agents are shuddering because December heralds all these manuscripts hitting their floors. Many of them are saying they won’t look at a book that arrives in December because it won’t have moved beyond a first draft.

If you are not heading into the bunker to write you may be interested in the changing ownership hop of Figment, the teen writing community that keeps getting bought by very big publishers.... If I was very cynical I’d wonder whether they were keen to get their hands on the next big young thing who knows nothing about the cut throat business of publishing.... Lucky I’m not.... Dave Gaughren has a good blog post on this subject.

Publishers Weekly article this week is definitely scaring quite a few people. The article has anonymous agents and editors saying publishers are beginning to carefully change contract wording so it doesn’t say what format they will publish the book in. If publishers don’t commit to a print edition or they go to a POD print edition so that rights will never revert back...or the Print edition will be under their new imprint where the writer pays costs (read Author Solutions here) then writer’s dreams may rapidly turn to nightmares.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a comparison piece on the indie music scene and the indie publishing scene and couldn’t find one and then into my Twitter feed pops this opinion piece from a musician writer.... Interesting reading.


Joanna Penn has an interview with an expert on selling books into Germany. They have the biggest population of readers in Europe.

Now for all those great Craft Treats

These are the best blog posts I’ve seen on plotting this week.



Other inspirational writing tips worthy of bookmarking









To Finish,
Two stellar opinion pieces.
On writing Y A from a literary writer... and what he learned, which was a heck of a lot!
Hugh Howey on the challenge of connecting with readers directly. You need to do it.

Here is my All Hallows treat for you...Writing tips fromGreat Authors. 
Print out a couple of these and hang them over your desk!

maureen

This great pic was from http://www.flickr.com/photos/rattler97/
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