Probably, the best advice I've ever come across from a writer on writing is Elmore Leonard's suggestion, "If it sounds like writing, rewrite it." Second best is Mark Twain's illustration of how to show, don't tell, followed by Margaret Atwood's close third, "Do back exercises. Pain is distracting."
Links of the week August 20 2018 (34)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
27 August 2018
For Hemingway, the secret to effective writing was to forget about the flowery prose of the literati and keep your writing simple, short, and clear. When he went to work for the Kansas City Star in 1917, he was given four rules for effective writing, and he stuck with them his whole life.
The media and entertainment industry has a long history of embracing disruptive innovations, from the printing press to the personal computer. But the rapid shift from physical to digital over the past decade or so has been truly revolutionary. In general, physical media has suffered a great deal. Printed newspapers and magazines have migrated to online versions, while DVDs and CDs have been supplanted by film- and music-streaming services.
But the oldest form of physical media is actually holding up quite well. According to PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2018-2022, the consumer market for physical, printed books is holding its own in an increasingly digital world (see "Print Presses On"). Between 2018 and 2022, sales of physical video games, home video, and music are expected to decline each year, in some instances by double-digit percentages. By contrast, sales of physical books are expected to grow modestly, by about 1 percent annually, every year. By 2022, PwC expects consumers around the world will spend US$50.3 billion on books in physical or audio (i.e., non-electronic) form, compared with $47.8 billion in 2017.
Are you curious about all of the changes going on at CreateSpace and seeing new offerings being announced at Kindle Direct Publishing? I have been, too.
I will admit that I have not paid as much attention to KDP Print as I should have. I have been happy with CreateSpace for my Amazon printing and distribution and just did not have the bandwidth to turn my attention to yet ANOTHER platform for my paperbacks. Knowing that CreateSpace could get my paperback on Amazon while IngramSpark/Lightning Source was handling the wholesalers/bookstores/libraries, I thought I had all my bases covered.
What Happened
Well, a few months ago, CreateSpace announced that it was discontinuing all author publishing services. Authors and publishers would no longer be able to use CreateSpace for editorial, lay out, design, or cover work. The staff in those departments was let go. This all happened SO quickly and the hue and cry from the self-publishing community was enormous. Yet, CreateSpace and Amazon moved ahead knowing that the profit margins on working with authors and micro-publishers on editorial and design elements were not in line with Amazon's business model or goals. Authors and micro-publishers are not big enough to keep a design and editorial division at CreateSpace viable. To stay profitable, a company would have to charge a LOT more than CreateSpace was charging.
Laini Taylor is the author of the Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, as well as the National Book Award Finalist Lips Touch: Three Times and others. Take notes, because Taylor's sharing her writing tips.
I've wanted to be a writer since I was a small child, but I was 35 before I finished my first novel, because I have issues with perfectionism. It took me a long time to learn to finish what I start, and I've developed a lot of tools and tricks for keeping myself moving forward through a story when a big slice of my brain wants nothing so much as to stop and rewrite everything I've already written. It can be exhausting, but the upside is that I love to revise. The main thing I've learned is that we all have to learn to work with-and appreciate-the brain we've been given, and not waste time wishing things were easier
Dear Polly,
Recently, after years of being afraid to confront this reality, I accepted that I want to be a writer. Specifically, a YA novelist. I work full-time as a designer, but I've been diligently working on my manuscript every night for at least three months now, and am about 25 to 30 percent done.
Dear HSISMT?,
Believing that publishing a book will fix your life is a little bit like believing that success or love or a trip around the world will save you. It's the kind of escape fantasy that's entirely intellectual and theoretical, so it's difficult to test. Just as you won't know if you like skydiving until someone pushes you out of an airplane, you won't find out if publishing a book will bring you satisfaction until you're standing in front of your mom and two of her friends at a bookstore, reading your own words in a wavering voice.
Stephen King isn't the only author who's becoming more and more prevalent on the big and small screens. It was just announced that Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi novelette Nine Lives is getting a movie adaptation, adding to the growing pile of Le Guin works that are reportedly in the works.
The accomplished author sadly passed away in January, but her written works are living on-not only in the long-awaited documentary Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, but also in several planned adaptations of her classic novels and shorter stories. Most of them aren't exactly in active production right now because these things take time, but let's hope for some updates soon. Here's a list of every TV and movie adaptation that might in store for Le Guin fans, as well as sci-fi and fantasy aficionados everywhere.
Recently, I've received a lot of questions from poets who would like to blog books of poetry. Since publishing books of poetry traditionally can prove very difficult (Sorry, if that news is a shock to you.), I think blogging a poetry book to build a large enough fan base for your work via a blog is actually quite a phenomenal idea. You also can self-publish it.
How would you go about doing this. Oh, so simply, really. Here are the steps:
- Write a poem.
- Post it on your blog.
- Tell everyone you know you did so (via social networks).
Pretty, simple, huh?
20 August 2018
In an open letter this month addressed to members of the Authors Guild, the organization's vice president, the American author Richard Russo, has warned that tech companies' operations in the content space may increasingly threaten writers' livelihoods and recognition.
"Traditional publishers may have underpaid us," Russo writes, "but at least to them we were poets and painters and songwriters, terms that implied both respect and ownership of what we made, at least until we've sold it to them.
"The tech ethos is different. To them, we're often seen as mere hirelings. And since those who hire us are in the business of business, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to pay us as little as they can get away with and to make certain we understand that we're mere workers, not partners in the enterprise."
A great book cover, a marketing plan, and a cool author website are all important, but if an author hasn't spent the time and money for a solid editing job, it's all just wasted effort.
The reading public has no time for badly edited, error-ridden books.
That's true in the traditional publishing world, of course-but it's even more relevant for indie authors. Sloppy work tars everyone.
Every time a badly edited book is published, it chips away at the reputation of the self-published writers who aren't producing rubbish," says Gary Smailes, cofounder of BubbleCow, a U.K.-based company that provides editing and proofreading services to indie authors around the world. "But readers are more forgiving of self-published writers if they appear to have taken a real effort."
Indeed, a book with no errors is a rare thing. Mistakes frequently even make their way into the thoroughly vetted books that come out of big, traditional publishing houses, where professional editors and proofreaders rake manuscripts with the finest of fine-tooth combs. And that's despite the fact that most manuscripts go through an intensive editing process before they're even accepted by a literary agent and shopped around.
This year's International Book Fair is to feature a new, dedicated children's publishing strand, to help cater to a "booming" market for kids' books in China.
According to the Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA), China is now the fifth-largest licensed market in the world-and it is still growing rapidly, particularly for children's content. Publishers have said that the relaxing of China's one-child policy, coupled with the cultural emphasis on reading and education, gives the market sizeable potential for growth. "We can never underestimate the sheer size of the Chinese population as well as their enthusiasm for children's education", says Paula Ziedna, foreign-language operations director at Usborne. "Chinese publishers' buying power has grown significantly in recent years, together with their appetite for [a broader] variety of titles. China is one of the rare markets where there is no limit as to the topics that can sell, as the market is so large."
When it comes to determining what the best service for print on demand books is, there's no easy answer. It depends on a number of factors, including: the type of book you're printing, your budget, your plans for online distribution, whether you want to distribute to brick-and-mortar bookstores, and the quality of the printers.
To ensure we got the real indie author experience, we printed a copy of Not the Faintest Trace - a novel by Reedsy author Wendy M. Wilson, formatted through the Reedsy Book Editor, and designed by Patrick Knowles - from the four print-on-demand companies. We then had each copy delivered to Reedsy HQ so that we could review the quality, look, and feel of each proof.
‘When you've been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds,' says San Diego researcher Jean M. Twenge, long-form immersive reading is a tall order.
It's perfectly understandable that one of the least popular comments researchers can make around book publishers these days is that young people are reading less. Nevertheless, when the point is put forward with the weight of scientific studies behind it, it's hard to deny that the trend is deeply underway - toward short-form bursts of reading and writing on one social medium or another, and away from the long-form immersive-reading experience of a book.
Today would have been the 98th birthday of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, who (by no small coincidence) also happened to know a thing or two about writing. Like many American children, I grew up on Bradbury-"The Veldt" remains my favorite of his stories-but as I became a writer myself I began to cherish not just the great author's work, but his attitude towards it. Bradbury loved writing. He took intense pleasure in it, and it shows on every page. This is, of course, not possible for everyone, but still, I find it to be a lovely antidote to all the hand-wringing and hair-tearing and sit-at-the-typwriter-and-bleeding contemporary writers seem to do (or claim to do, online or otherwise) these days.
Quantity creates quality:
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week-it doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can't be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that's just wonderful.
English author Angela Carter, known for her dark feminist stories, always told people that she wrote her first novel when she was only six years old. Bill and Tom Go to Pussy Market was "full of social realism: cats going about their daily business." As a child, her favorite cat was named Charlie (a naughty kitty who liked to use her mother's shoes as a litter box). She adopted a white cat with "lavender ears" and "bracken-colored eyes" with her first husband, Paul Carter. After winning the Somerset Maugham Award in 1969 for her novel Several Perceptions, Carter used the proceeds to travel to Japan following her estrangement from Paul.
If anyone deserves the title of cat enthusiast, it's Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer author once wrote: "When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction." And, goodness, did Twain love cats - over thirty of them. Always the gifted raconteur, Twain's autobiography is a must-read for fans of the cranky cat collector, who at one time put an ad out in all the newspapers when his beloved black kitty Bambino went missing. Lines of fans with random cats showed up at the Twain household just to get a peek at the famous writer.