A Week Of It

Such a busy week, Monday started with the  NZ National Librarians Children’s Book Awards. A great night with some expected and unexpected wins. The Hells Pizza chain committed to another year of sponsorship. These are the only book awards left in NZ with sponsorship.

Then Tuesday night our Tinderbox conference opened for registrations. The team gathered to toast the opening and watch the screen fill up. Some workshops are close to full already less than 48 hours later. It looks like we got the mix right with hands on workshops on writing and illustrating, marketing, tax, contracts, editing, presenting, school visits, self publishing, copyright and translation. Phew. After adding in various dinner and wine events, we all needed a lie down before we opened for registrations. Don’t leave it too late to register we might be fully subscribed in less than a week.   

This week Amazon changed their Kindle Unlimited pay per borrow rules. Now it is pay per page read... The sky is falling ran the comments on Social Media. Hugh Howey shook his head and launched into finger waving as he called out the worst nay sayers. Hugh doesn’t think there is a problem at all. Porter took a more measured approach with comment from lots of sources... Do you want one entity to know so much about your reading habits?

This week the Authors Guild launched their fair contracts for writers campaign. Its time to let the public know just what can be stuffed into a writers contract. Porter talks to the new guild president and finds out why they are calling on readers to back the authors. Frankly the increasing prevalence of harsh non compete clauses deserve to be exposed as unethical and unreasonable bullying.

The lovely Janice Hardy has a great post on can we know too much about the publishing industry. here she outlines three mindsets and encourages everyone to find what inspired them most to start writing. Sometimes you need to block out the publishing world.

Today Smashwords launched a nifty addition- pre orders across the board to all their outlets... and you don’t need the product ready.  You can use your pre order date as your writing deadline. Mark Coker explains all in his blog today.

In the Craft Section,

Tiffany Reisz on dialogue - Great Post

K M Weiland on Character goals

Different Story Starters

The Seven Sins of World Building

10 Simple keys to Story Structure- (Bookmark)

Complex Book Plotting – Great Post

Creating Menacing Antagonists

Writers Block – ways to combat this.

Joanna Penn interviews Jen Blood on Editing (Bookmark)

In the Marketing Section,

How to get readers hooked from your e-book sample

How to Design a great e-book without design skills

Anne R Allen on dos and don’t for author bloggers

E tools for freelancers (comprehensive list)

Free Marketing tools.

Website of The Week

Writers In The Storm have a great website with interesting resources and articles. This article by Susan Spann is from earlier in the year on protecting your copyrights online.  Always relevant!

To Finish,

Joanna Penn interviews Nathan Meunier about gaming and writing and some very exciting software that allows you to write a choose your own adventure book and turn it into a game...

And the week isn’t finished yet!

Maureen

@craicer

Pic Flickr /Creative Commons/ photosteve101

Looking Ahead

This week the winners of the LIANZA’S (Librarian and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa) were announced at lovely event in Wellington. I spoke to one of the judges at the event and we talked about the depth of books on offer this year. The judge said that they could have picked another 5 in each category, so I raised the issue that maybe they need a long list. After all The ManBooker has one. One of the important things about a long list is it raises the profile of up and coming authors. This is really important in a small country with a shrinking publishing market. Sales into libraries and schools make all the difference in our small publishing world. A good long list can become a first port of call for school book buyers. (here’s hoping they take it on board!)

"I was brave in my writing, in a way I wasn't in my life." -Judy Blume #LA14SCBWI pic.twitter.com/UgfCHFKyEt
— Samantha Berger (@BergerBooks) August 3, 2014

The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators 2014 annual conference wound up in LA this week. Over 1300 kids lit people in one space...WOW. This conference is usually a sellout every year. Some great keynotes and panels were on offer. Fix your self a long drink and scroll down the conference blog where they had notes on all the events.

If you are feeling in need of a conference the ever popular WriteOnCon is back in a couple of weeks. This is a free online conference over two days for Kids Lit writers. It is worth dropping into... getting up early and attending.

This week the stoush between Hachette and Amazon hits the 4^th month and the online letter to Amazon from concerned writers hit 900 signatories.

Also in the news is the opening up of the Authors Guild (finally) to Indie writers. This has been loudly applauded... and the appointment of best selling Indie C J Lyon’s to the board has the blogosphere jumping with excitement. First up she called for ways to make the guild better. Joe Konrath produced a 12 point plan that was a masterpiece. Every writers organization should be taking a look at it. The discussion has been wide ranging and is still on going.

The LA Times has been talking ebook numbers...and the sometimes skewed reporting around them.

The Huffington Post has an article on how Barbara Freethy became a best seller...(Interesting post)

Eileen Goudge is a traditional best seller and she is looking at her first foray into self publishing because her publisher no longer felt she was a hot property... after 13 NYT best sellers...

In the Craft Section,

Should you hire an editor before querying

Editing – top ten tips

Crafting stronger characters

Boring opening lines and what to do about them

Why you should ignore most of the advice from your critiquegroup. (great post)

The keys to a great opening scene

Smooth transitions to keep your story moving.

In the Marketing Section,

Lessons from 2014 RWA –tips for marketing success – Jami Gold

Author digital marketing tools

Social Media Platform infographic (this is a printout post!)

Joanna Penn on using Wattpad

How to do Box Sets at Smashwords

6 tips to champion your story

To Finish,

Jane Friedman has an interesting guest post about an Appcalled Episode. It allows writers to post up chapters with animation or comic book styles and have reader interaction. Perfect place to play with characters etc and the whole thing is specifically designed for mobile reading... A sign post for the future.

maureen

Bookmark It

This last week I’ve been meeting up with writers in various venues discussing writery things.... Sometimes it was what we thought the librarians would pick as their top books for 2012 in the Librarian and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa or the LIANZA’s as they are most commonly referred to. The awards are out...and I have great pleasure in saying to various writers.... including award winners...I told you so!

In other publishing blogosphere news... LA SCBWI conference wrapped up this week. This conference is the one everyone in children’s writing wants to go to, (or the NY Winter conference.) A few years ago they got a team of writer bloggers together who blog the conference for all of us who live around the world and can’t get to LA. Go to the blog and scroll down on the right for all the topics covered... Take your time and dip into the conference panels, keynotes, interviews....aaaaah. There is even a sampling of fabulous tweets from #LA13SCBWI throughout the four days.

When you finish that...breathe deeply. Squash down that green imp of jealousy and register for WriteOnCon...a free two day online conference for children’s writers, now in its fourth year, happening next week. With another brilliant line up of speakers again. WriteOnCon 2012 is still being referenced around the blogosphere now. IT WAS THAT GOOD.

When you have done that...

Make the time to watch this fabulous video where Joanna Penn interviews James Scott Bell on writing, self publishing and the business of being a prowriter. It is top notch brilliant. I have two of James Scott Bell’s books and they are amazing!

And after that...

You must read this blog post.

Susan Kaye Quinn on writing the five year plan and the fiveyear creative plan...So much writer awesomeness in one package.

If you are interested in gatekeepers...(you want more of them) copyright protections...(you want less of it) then you need to take a look at Porter’s Ether for the week and that will bring you up to speed on what has been talked about this week around the water coolers in New York.

If you want to get right to the craft bit.

Developing a strong third person voice...from Killzone.

Carol Riggs on knowing when your MS is ready to be sent out.

K M Weiland on making your book live up to its potential.

Ginger Clark...(Uber Kid’s Lit Agent) answers questions from writers...great round up including is there an optimum time to send that query?

In Marketing

Bookbaby has free book launch strategies.

So there you have it every one a bookmark post!

To Finish,

I have been following the misogynist pull up in Sci Fi for the last month. It is Con season in the states...and the trolls are out in force. Sci Fi writers are often at Con’s as part of their publishing contracts and it has been sad to see them having to defend their right to be there if they are women. However there are quite a few male Sci Fi writers pushing the misogynists right back, as John Scalzi beautifully says in ‘A Creator’s Note To Gatekeepers’ it’s an economic argument. Women read and play these cool games too.

So around the blogosphere there has been general high fives when one writer called the police over the 50 rape and murder threats she received in two hours...ongoing. And there was an arrest. When a writer commented on this in her BBC radio programme she was inundated with the same kind of troll calls. So she asked to talk to a couple of trolls. It was enlightening for everybody!

Along with this was Cassandra Clare’s experience as a YA novelist at Comic Con this week with the City Of Bones movie set to come out very soon. Interviewers questions were inane because they saw the movie as being for teenage girls and they weren’t worth wasting time on.

Anyone seeing red yet?

Read the great slap back which is being tweeted around the blogosphere today.

"We write by the light of every book we've ever read." Richard Peck

maureen

pic from Flickr/creative commons- The Laird of Oldham The flag of Greater Manchester City.

Studying To Suceed

On Monday I had the good fortune to attend the LIANZA awards. 

New Zealand librarians chose the best books published for children in the past year. 

Congratulations to the winners! Among the established high profile awards given were new awards in sub categories for books published in Te Reo Maori. As more people are becoming literate in the Maori Language there is a need for books to become more sophisticated. A lot of what has been published in Maori are children’s readers and non fiction. This is now beginning to change as children fluent in te reo age. I was happy to see that a novel based around science fiction including elements of myths and world building was the inaugural winner in the young adult section of the Te Reo awards. When you can have this kind of sophisticated plot, playing with futurist ideas, you know that the Maori language is alive and flourishing.  

Dinner out after with some of the brightest talents in Children’s Writing and Illustration in this country was the icing on the cake...and the jump start to my night....(Thanks for the help and the laughter, Children’s Writers and Illustrators are the best!)

WriteOnCon  has finished and the children’s literature world is digesting the insights gained.  So if you have been studying hard after reading the SCBWI blog (which I urged you to do two weeks ago...) here is this weeks study homework.

Adventures in Publishing have gathered together a conference round up for each day of the WriteOnCon

Day One and Day Two and Day Three and boy there is some great information tucked away in here.

Miriam Forster has put the two videos by Shelli Johannes-Wells on author branding from the conference on her website so hop on over and have a look.

If you want more information on author branding, The Book Designer has a comprehensive article on the subject. Everything you wanted to know...don’t forget that author branding equals business branding.

The Great Jane has interviewed Johanna Harness about the twitter phenomenon that is the #amwriting group. This is an interesting project by an unpublished writer using social media to get known. With over 2000 people participating in the project and an Amazon store and CafePress merchandise site you have to ask yourself  is this the way of the future? (If you have a book coming out with a great theme check out your contract...if it doesn't specifically say anything about merch maybe you need to look into it...a range of interesting quotes from the books and the book cover could make a nice tee shirt (thinking a certain Shakespear sequel here))

It is an interesting interview. Being interviewed on the No Rules blog jumped her stats over 1000%

Dean Wesley Smith has written an interesting overview of what he thinks is happening in publishing. He equates publishers as huge ships that take a long time to change course. The winners are the small press and indie publishers. They can move faster and ride the wave better. Authors who have a long backlist can profit also from the e-publishing phenomenon.

On Craicerplus (My Amplify Page) There are links to articles on

Swords Dominate 2009 Fantasy Cover Art...

The Ultimate Checklist Before Submitting Your Novel.(this is brilliant!)

How To Ensure 75% of Agents Will Request Your Material.(required reading)

Dean Wesley Smith- Killing The Sacred Cows of Publishing...thought provoking article by Dean with an Agent Responding...

10 Things To Do To Become A Better Writer In 10 Days

Self Publishing? A look At Lightening Source.

Finally

In the News -UK Penguin are opening their inboxes for a limited time to unsolicited manuscript submissions...very brave of them...

And

Nathan Bransford asks the question -If You Were King or Queen Of The Publishing Industry What Would Be Your First Order of Business?

Some very funny responses...give everyone donuts...yep after my day today....

Enjoy...off to find a donut

maureen

Image is from the very funny website Better Book Titles- The Titles They Should Have Used.

Yes - It is For Frankenstein!

(check out the rest!)