In Publishing News this week.
In headlines around the world, Taylor Swift bought back her original master recordings of her first six albums. Why have I put this news in my weekly blog? It all has to do with copyright and the value of that copyright. If you read the saga which starts when 14 year old Taylor signed her first 6 albums away to the record company in perpetuity, there is a moment where the writer winces with recognition of a contract that takes all rights. A trail blazing young icon like Taylor is letting the music industry know that copyright matters. In return I hear that music contracts are now being tweaked to include percentages of ticket sales and merchandise which was the only way artists could make a living if they were owned by a record company.
Contracts are very much on the mind of the writers caught up in the Unbound Bankruptcy scandal. Many writers discovered that even though they were owed royalties,(thousands of $$) they were unsecured creditors in the case of a bankruptcy, while their books were seen as assets to be sold on under bankruptcy legislation. This is exactly what happened to the assets of Unbound. What stings is that some of the original principals of Unbound rebranded themselves as Boundless and bought the assets. You can imagine how this has been seen. Most of their staff has walked out the door in protest. Bankruptcy law trumps contracts unless you have a clause saying that if the publisher goes bankrupt you get your rights back immediately. This clause needs to be inserted in the contract by the writer. A publisher will never put that clause in by themselves.
Booktok has been questioning inequality in publishing. This week an Australian rugby star and new social media user suddenly got a book publishing deal on basically nothing but looks and potential. Whether they can write is another question altogether.
Recently Publishers Weekly hosted a day long US Book Show. Big topics for attending publishers were how to navigate the political landscape to keep publishing books.
Also in the news was the rise of dark romance sales in the US and another survey about how the world seems to be embracing audiobooks. The sales are now almost neck and neck with print.
Kathleen Schmidt has a post about how toxic Threads has become for the book community. It seems that pile on behaviour and bad mouthing each other is still with us, even though the book community left Twitter because of it. Rule: Don’t engage the trolls.
If you read the above paragraph and thought ‘it was probably AI bots’ you might need a lie down after reading Dan Holloways post on how AI was taught to interact with Reddit users, and also to recreate Agatha Christie into a writing teacher. Dan also looks at the Bookbub survey on how many writers are using AI in their work. The answers may surprise you.
Sean Kernan has an excellent article on how you can tell when ChatGPT is used to write something. This may be of use to writing competitions to weed out the bad apples.
Or as one kindle reviewer put it in a 1 star review, ‘I thought it was bad and then I found the pasted in prompt from Chat GPT in the middle of the paragraph asking for the novel to be written in the style of another writer.’
Mark Williams offers his own acerbic take on how publishers should be using AI licensing deals. The genie is out of the bottle- figure out a way to use it for the benefit of the writers.
Anne R Allen writes that Book Scammers are out there still with a quick roundup of some new twists on old scams. Yes of course, it’s easy to buy a slot on the New York Times Billboard in Times square. Just put your money into a Nigerian prince’s bank account.
The New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults shortlist is out. This year the list embraces our place in the Pacific with a record number of pacific themed books in the shortlist. Congratulations to all the shortlisted authors and illustrators. It is super hard to judge these awards, I know because I have judged them. There will have been many books that will have nearly made it. If they published a long list like the adult book awards we wouldn’t be asking every year why some brilliant book hasn’t made the list. The number of entries must be nearly the same by now.
If you are wondering how to get started with your latest novel idea why don’t you try a Dear Reader letter to yourself. Tara Alemany writes the questions you should be asking the reader about what they want to read. Doing this exercise has a two fold benefit, it focuses your mind on the story you want to tell and it gives you some ideas for marketing it after you’ve written it.
In The Craft Section,
Plan like a pro Write like a rebel- Tammy Burke
The 3 act structure- Gabriela Pereira- Bookmark
Creating escalating complications- Lisa Poisso- Bookmark
Overexplaining in dialogue- K M Weiland- Bookmark
When the good guys must die-P J Parrish- Bookmark
In The Marketing Section,
Author Automations Start small layer with purpose - Chelle Honniker- Bookmark
10 ways to boost sales with Google Play-Indie author magazine- Bookmark
How to market your audiobook- Rachel Thompson- Bookmark
How to get more media- Penny Sansevieri
Launching your book successfully with preorders- Draft2Digital- Bookmark
Book Marketing with 10 AI prompts- Fazia Burke
To Finish
If you haven’t checked out Storybundle yet, you should. It is a collection of writing craft books by great authors. You get a great collection, the writers get the money, and you get to support a great charity. It’s a total win win win! It is only available for another week and then it’s gone.
Give it to yourself for making it half way through the year.
Maureen
@craicer
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Photo by Kasia Derenda on Unsplash
