Features

Cross-Posted from Christopher Meeks’ blog on Red Room.

Last night I attended a panel at USC entitled “The Changing Face of Publication,” hosted by one of my favorite novelists, Gina Nahai (Cry of the Peacock). The five panelists, with five different jobs and all deeply involved in publishing, offered a view on how publishing is done now and where the industry is and is not going.

The latter was the most important, which, to authors reading this, may change your view of what you can expect in 2009. It certainly sobered my expectations in publishing. From my own […]

You don’t need to be paying close attention to notice the fragmentation that characterizes much of America’s contemporary life. Your home town newspaper has ceased to print or will soon do so. This is happening to the ANN ARBOR NEWS (never a very good newspaper, but one that did a fair to middling job of holding its community together). Some of the nation’s biggest and best papers have already folded and THE BOSTON GLOBE seems likely to follow. These, and the NEW YORK TIMES are my own favorite print sources of news and the TIMES is also having problems.

Elsewhere […]

April Hamilton of Publetariat has a very interesting and important blog entry called Hubris, Not Bad Writing Or Design, Sinks Most Self-Published Nonfiction.  In it she describes judging book for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards – including books about weight loss and Youtube marketing by people who are wholly unqualified to cover the topic.  She writes:

The tendency of so many authors to base an entire book or belief system on false correlations, or even mere coincidence, was astonishing to me, as was their complete lack of awareness that their ability to formulate a possible cause-and-effect relationship does

POD = pod

As a self-published POD, I think I may be in a good place, considering. Just got into two bookstores, and I am awaiting a blurb from someone I hope is influential enough to convince more people to read my book.

I learned today, however, that having a book in a store, on a shelf, doesn’t necessarily place me above pod (lowercase) status when compared to the Published butterflies.

I’ve been trying to schedule a reading at one of the stores that currently has my book, but the woman who schedules the events has yet to return […]

Running this website has been eye-opening, in that I now have some sense of what it’s like to be a literary agent being inundated with queries from eager writers.  If you want some sense of what it’s like, check out Nathan Bransford’s blog for his recent query contest, in which he posted 50 different queries from readers of his blog.

I can imagine at some point turning into the Query Shark (Janet Reid) and wanting to rip apart queries because it can be frustrating to see the same problems again and again. As time goes on and I become […]

There’s a lot of interesting discussion about self-publishing going on in the blogosphere, beginning with Victoria Strauss who writes for the Writer Beware blog.  She calls out a recent article on CNN that paints too rosy a picture of self-publishing.  Not revealing, for instance, that a successful self-publisher also had a high-powered PR firm working for her.  I would argue this is the case with a lot of journalism in general – it errs on the side of being overly positive.  That’s the nature of the puff piece.

But she’s right, in a way.  Self-publishing is not yet a replacement […]