This week the publishing blogosphere has been watching the
‘dialogue’ between Hugh Howey and Mike Shatzkin about Hugh’s opinion piece, The State of Self Publishing. The
Amazon Hachette saga seems to have been taken over by a morphing of The
Traditional publishing route defenders and the Self / Indie publishing
defenders. Each side sniping their opinions with increasing vitriol.
Hugh and Mike have important things to say on how both publishers and writers are finding the current publishing climate and I found
myself nodding in agreement with both of them. Publishing is diverging. Porter endeavours to walk the middle line as he examines their arguments.
Passive Guy is known for his measured objective lawyer opinion
on publishing. He was invited by the NY Public Library to be a self publishing
representative on a high powered panel involving James Patterson and a bunch of
lawyers on the state of publishing. Amazon: Business as usual? It does not sound like a happy experience but it was an illuminating one.
Val McDermid was recently interviewed by The Telegraph and
she stated that if she was starting out now her career would be over. Her
career took off after the fourth book. These days if your first book hasn’t
taken off or you haven’t won awards... you are dropped. This is a sobering interview worth
reading. Hugh Howey commented today about it and implications for writers on
the flipping of the publishing model that is becoming increasingly apparent.
For children’s writers it still seems that Traditional is
still the top model at the moment as it is very print based. It will be
interesting to see if this model changes in the next few years.
In the UK a bunch of publishers and editors were asked if publishing was still cool. Publishing Perspectives talks about their answers.
Joanna Penn interviews Bob Mayer on author mindset...great
article. (transcript below the video)
Yvette Carol has written a nice blog post on how authors would like to get paid.
Writer Unboxed has an article on Author Attitude.
Killzone and Craft of Writing Guru, James Scott Bell has a
fab post – Is it Plagiarism to steal a plot.
Why Self Publishers should go it alone together... this is
taking the author collective model to the next step...
The wonderful Jennie Crusie on managing your writing time.
In the Craft Section,
Writing prompts – exercises
Roz Morris on writing to an outline.
Rachel Gardner on 7 bad habits of highly successful authors
K M Weiland on Character Reactions
In the Marketing Section,
Two great posts from Seeley James 5 Marketing tips and
Display Ads marketing tips
Trim size (great article from Aussie kid lit author on POD publishing)
Apple ibooks marketing and discovery strategies – brilliant article!
Joanna Penn on Spanish translations... great article.
Jane Friedman on Author Taxes – this is US orientated but some good tips in there for everyone.
To Finish,
Brain Pickings recently celebrated seven years of providing
brilliant internet content. One of their supporters decided to make their Seven Things I’ve Learned post into a great graphic poster. Check it out.
I will be away for a couple of weeks. So you can take your
time reading through all the links in this big post. My predictions for the
news while I am away ... Amazon
and Hachette will still be arguing and Self publishers and Trad publishers will
still be at each others throats…For the writers it will be business as usual.
maureen
pic from Flickr/ Creative Commons/ abhi ryan
