Thursday, August 8, 2013

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.

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.




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

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.





Thursday, August 1, 2013

Rocking



Over the last week I have been wandering up and down the country avoiding the earthquakes in my home city...they were waiting for me when I came back...another three today...It’s like being on a moored boat every now and then the floor rocks.

Rocking the publishing blogosphere is some Amazon bashing that is going over the top...Melville House engages in some strong rhetoric that had the blogosphere shaking heads. Passive Guy takes a look at the impassioned argument from Melville House in Breaking News: Amazon declares war on the Book Industry and discusses what it may mean...someone needs to have a lie down.

Here in New Zealand the keynote speaker, Sandy Grant, at our local Publishers Association Awards...painted a disquieting picture echoing some of the passion from Melville House as well as looking at copyright issues and government efforts to break this. Authors are left scratching their heads...um where are we in all this?

Jami Gold has discovered new and horrible ways that authors are being pirated...and scraped by lowlifes and you will need to hang on to a table while you read this. It involves mash ups...fan fiction...scraping and Amazon...actually mixing that lot up and it could be some sort of new adult stuff which is the target of pirates at the moment. Wouldn’t it be simpler to write your own book?

Every now and again there is a publishing blogosphere story that won’t lie down...and the RandomPenguin washing of Author Solutions is one of them...Porter devoted a whole Ether post to it last week...I flagged it for you in my last post but since then it has got bigger and murkier....

Finally some happier news...after all how many shocks can you take...(last count over 1900 this week)

The fab Literary Agent Jennifer Laughren, from whom I shared a tweet with you a couple of weeks ago, had a Reddit community question time when you got to ask her anything on the agenting business. It is a great little read and explains why she is one of the top agents specializing in Kids Lit.
And Smashwords has a preorder button...Media Bistro tells all about it.

In Craft,
Chuck - Ten Thoughts On Story...by now you should be used to the warnings on content.

James Scott Bell from the great Killzone blog on creating conflict in fiction.


The League of Extraordinary Writers have their top craftbooks list...and I’m pleased to say I have about half of them...and JOLLY GOOD they are too. I’m working on acquiring another couple.

Writers In The Storm have a great post on figuring out turning points in your story...

In Marketing,


Selfpublishing advice talks to Bob Mayer on How He Did It....which echoes Kobowritinglife’s advice on how to promote on Kobo...

Bestsellerlabs has the second part of their navigating the book marketing maze...full of helpful tips.

Darla has another list of self publishing tips...

To Finish,
If you think you would like to try doing the audiobook yourself... Joanna Penn has a nifty little article for you about what it entails.

Since I started writing this...we had another three quakes...mostly they are little but every now and again Mother Earth likes to wake us up...which is why you need Resilience if you are a writer (Rachel Gardner) or just live in an earthquake zone....

maureen
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