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 Thursday, October 01, 2009
Gift Ideas for Writers
Posted by Jane
As many of you know, it was my birthday on Monday, and The
Conductor—who treats gift-giving as a dramatic art—always
looks for ways to surprise and delight.
For this gift-giving occasion, he chose the New Yorker as his theme, so
I received enough New Yorker product (calendar, book anthologies, and
cartoons) to probably keep Conde Nast in the black for a month.
The hard part is, and don't tell The Conductor, is that buying books
for someone in the book business isn't always a sure bet. Yes, I love
books of course, but sometimes the last thing I need is another book to
read. (Note to Kelly: There are always exceptions.)
In any case, I was thinking a lot about gift-giving this week, and the holidays are approaching.
Writer's Digest editor Zachary Petit asked the staff months ago for
gift recommendations in the November/December issue of the magazine. I
sent him several recommendations (though only one is included in the
issue). So in this blog post I'll mention them all.
Personalized Stationery
I've been known to spend about $500 on personalized notecards, which I
consider to be one of the classiest statements a writer can make. (And, sadly, I am out of
them at the moment, so I can't snap a photo for you.) I use FineStationery.com where it’s fun to create mock-ups. To really
splurge, choose a letterpress printing option. Unforgettable.
Poems For All
This is a cheap (free!) but thoughtful gift for writers and readers. I hope one day they make them available for bulk purchase.
iPhone
I can’t think of a better all-in-one device for a writer. Aside from
the standard phone call, you can use it for e-mail, surfing the web,
downloading music, Kindle reading, instant messaging, note taking,
voice recording, and a million other things through iPhone apps. The only way you could make it
more useful is if there were a small, external keyboard to plug into it.
(Then it could act as a mobile word processor.)
Knock Knock
Very hip and humorous productivity tools as well as eclectic gifts.
And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the parent
company of Writer's Digest, F+W Media, just launched a gift site,
SayItWithBooks.com. The cool part is that all purchases are gift-wrapped for free. (And for readers of this blog, use code PROMO25 for
25% off an order.)
P.S. Perhaps obvious, but Writer's Digest and WritersMarket.com
subscriptions are always good gifts too! Soon we'll be rolling out a
new VIP program that includes subscriptions to both, plus year-long
discounts in our Shop. Stay tuned for a formal announcement in the next week.
Fun | General
Thursday, October 01, 2009 6:31:31 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  Trackback
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Don't Fall in Love With Your Research
Posted by Jane
In the monthly Glimmer Train bulletin, you'll find some fabulous advice from working writers. Here's a bit of what novelist Eric Wasserman had to say about research (Eric pictured above):
Fiction writers can easily write themselves into a corner. For the writer of the researched story it almost inevitably happens when the details cease to be attached to characters, particularly when writing historical fiction, which is what I have been engaged in for a number of years. My manuscript reached over 1,000 pages at one point. Of the 450 pages I cut, the majority were sections where I had fallen in love with my research.
Also read J.P. Lacrampe on Humor in Fiction.
And more juicy advice, all free, in Bulletin 33 from Glimmer Train.
Craft & Technique
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 8:40:41 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Distribution Barrier for Self-Publishers: Less of an Issue?
Posted by Jane
When I started at Writer's Digest in 2001, my first assigned beat was the
self-publishing scene. I was given Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual
and The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing by Marilyn & Tom Ross, as
primers on the topic.
I edited the magazine's column on self-publishing (discontinued), the
newsstand-only special issues on self-publishing (also discontinued),
and helped coordinate the judging for the Self-Published Book Awards
(still going strong).
Back then, one of the biggest hurdles for any self-published author was
securing bookstore distribution for a printed book—a near impossibility
unless you could strike a deal with a wholesaler or distributor (also nearly impossible).
Much
of the advice we gave in the magazine, and elsewhere, focused on how
you could distribute and sell your book directly to readers, or through
specialty sales channels. (Fortunately, 50% of books sold in this
country are through specialty and mass-merchant accounts. A few
examples of a specialty account: Michael's craft store, salons, gift
shops.)
The indie scene is much different now for a few reasons:
(1) It is easier to take a risk on self-publishing your work
electronically since there is usually very little upfront investment.
(2) You can e-publish your work for a variety of channels
(including the
free-to-use Amazon DTP program), without securing an ISBN, and without granting
exclusivity to any one channel or retailer.
(3) Avid readers are beginning to buy and even prefer books in
electronic format, whether through Kindle, Sony Reader, or mobile
devices.
That said, don't take this as a sign that it's easy to realize
overnight success through self-publishing options, whether
electronically based or not. I really love Christina Katz's "back to
reality" advice, Good-bye, Cinderella: Self-Publishing Isn't the Only or Always the Best Choice for Writers.
There are many viewpoints, and there are just as many changes taking place daily in the industry. Just take the latest
announcement today from Smashwords, Sony Reader, and AuthorSolutions.
People who use Smashwords or AuthorSolutions to publish their work can
have their e-book made available on the Sony
Reader.
I spoke to Smashwords founder Mark Coker yesterday about the news, and
it's impressive to see what his service can now offer an indie author
(for free!):
-
Your e-book available for sale (or you can make it free to readers) in nine different formats,
including HTML, JavaScript, Kindle (.mobi), Epub, PDF, RTF, LRF (for
Sony), Palm Doc, and plain text (download or online view). This conversion process is totally automated, very fast (minutes), and based on
a Word document that you submit to Smashwords.
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Automatic distribution to people who use iPhones or Android-based phones.
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Distribution to BarnesandNoble.com, including Fictionwise and their
eReader app (distribution to B&N is contingent upon your files meeting format
requirements, e.g., having a proper cover image and copyright page)
-
And, as of today, distribution to people using Sony Reader.
Mark says that he's in talks with other major online retailers for even
more distribution opportunities. (I bet you can think of at least one
major book retailer not listed above.)
I see physical distribution becoming less of a meaningful barrier as authors can
distribute e-books in all the same places that traditional books are
sold.
It doesn't equate to instant or even easy success, but authors who are
able to create demand for their work, and aren't afraid of sweat-equity,
have the potential for success if happy readers (fans!) help spread the
good word.
Do you have an e-publishing experience to share? Or what questions does
this raise for people who are wondering if this path is worth the time
and energy?
For more:
Digitization & New Technology | Getting Published | Industry News & Trends | Self-Publishing
Tuesday, September 29, 2009 8:04:41 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Monday, September 28, 2009
Excellent (and Free) Presentation on Self-Publishing
Posted by Jane
At our conference last week, April Hamilton gave an in-depth presentation on the basics of getting started in self-publishing—or as an indie author.
Click here to download her presentation as a PDF file.
I blogged some tips from her session on the Writer's Digest Conference blog, which I'm reposting below.
April's definition of an indie author
An indie author is not someone
who is using self-publishing as a desperation move, but as a carefully
considered and conscious decision to self-publish. An indie author is a
businessperson and an entrepreneur.
Some easy ways to create e-books
- Easy-easy (one-click publishing): Scribd
- Easy-easy (one-click publishing): Smashwords
- A little more complicated: Amazon DTP (Kindle)
- Add-on option with POD services like Lulu
Choosing a POD or self-pub service
April gets down to brass tacks when it comes to choosing a
publishing/POD service based on the upfront costs and back-loaded fees—plus how you want (or they want!) to price your book. Lots of useful
charts and graphs in her presentation showing how to do the math.
You can get a taste of this by looking at her blog post that compares Lulu and CreateSpace.
If you're considering self-publishing, be sure to check out April's community site devoted to your indie-author options: Publetariat.
(I also recommend Self-Publishing Review.)
Conferences/Events | Digitization & New Technology | Getting Published | Self-Publishing
Monday, September 28, 2009 3:14:38 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Best Tweets Returns Mid-October
Posted by Jane
Due to Writer's Digest events & other travel (my birthday travel & my mother's birthday travel), Best Tweets is on hiatus until the week ending October 16. Those who have been sending recommendations: I still have them on tap and will see if they're still appropriate for the next round-up. Thankfully, after this hiatus, I expect Best Tweets to continue uninterrupted until the December holidays.
Below: Jane sprouts a birthday flower from her head.
Best of Twitter
Monday, September 28, 2009 3:02:45 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Friday, September 25, 2009
The First Writer's Digest Editor's Intensive (And a Boy's First Snowman)
Posted by Jane
Today's guest post is by the generous Darrelyn Saloom, who has brought numerous new readers to my blog. I thank her and I thank you. Follow Darrelyn on Twitter.
Imagine writing a book (any genre, fiction or nonfiction),
typing away for ages and then opening an e-mail that says Writer’s Digest (a magazine you’ve enjoyed for years) is having an
event (their first) called the Writer’s Digest Editor's Intensive. And, if you
attend, an editor will read fifty pages of your manuscript—fifty pages!—to be read by a professional, not your mother, or
sister who stopped answering her phone.
Excited to receive such an e-mail, I wanted to go. But did I
want to fly to Ohio in December? It gets cold in Ohio, and I live in the South.
So far south it only snows once every five years—at the most. And rarely sticks
to the ground. The cold sort of scared me. And the name of the event scared me,
too: An Editor's Intensive. I imagined a
group of editors, squinting at manuscripts, lines etched between brows, faces frozen
in frowns.
But fifty pages of manuscript! For the past two years I’d
been working with boxing champion, Deirdre Gogarty, on her memoir. And in those (inevitable?) moments of
doubt, we had questions: Are we headed in the right direction? Or wasting our
time? We wanted answers. And if Deirdre and I both signed up, we could submit a
hundred pages!
So we signed up online. And the first thing I did was buy a
Michelin-Man coat. Down-filled and puffy. And warm—make that hot, worn indoors
made me sweat—a lot. I bought gloves and socks, a scarf and wool cap, while
Deirdre (who packed a light jacket) found someone to feed her two cats.
And then we flew to Cincinnati (actually to Kentucky but on
the state line). Into a taxi to Hannaford Suites, no need to rent a car. Okay,
we needed a car. But managed just fine (thank you Sharon Pielemeier and Barbara
Weibel for the rides!). After the first day, Chuck, Jane, and Alice left us
wiser than wise (and their faces were not frozen in frowns or squinting
lines!).
We learned
about Facebook and Twitter, WordPress and blogging, platform and publishing.
And made the kind of friends you keep for life: Other writers from around the
country who were as nervous as Deirdre and I. For the next day was Sunday, the
day of our appointed critique. So Saturday night, a group of us went out to
eat.
And then we
searched for bookstores, which closed by nine. So we pressed our noses to the
windows and visualized: the books of Barbara Weibel, Sean Miller, Kent Ostby,
Caitlin O’Sullivan, Amber Gardner, Mark Benedict, Deirdre Gogarty, and mine. It
was magical, really. Bonded by a desire to publish stories we write. And by
doubts, questions, and obstacles that plague a writer’s life.
On Sunday, we huddled together and waited our turn. We discussed
our manuscripts and scanned faces of fellow writers as they emerged. And every one I talked to went in
nervous but left satisfied. Some were sobered by reality, others floated on
cloud-nine. But questions were answered, and manuscripts were marked with
professional advice: Valuable information that defied any price.
Never wore the down-filled coat at the conference. Turned out Deirdre was right to pack
only a light jacket (though I brought one of those, too). I’ve only worn my
Michelin-Man coat once since I bought it last year. A short time later, the magic I found in Cincinnati seemed
to follow me home—and it snowed. So I bundled up and played outside. And my
grandson, Milas, built the first real snowman of his life.
Conferences/Events | Guest Post
Friday, September 25, 2009 6:55:32 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
A Note About My Good Friend Earl
Posted by Jane
There's a joke by Jay Leno that goes something like:
Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends.
And
there's another saying, in publishing: Only work with authors who you
wouldn't mind being stranded with in an airport for 8 hours.
In 2003, at my first year speaking at the Midwest Writers Workshop,
I spent a lot of time in an airport with Earl Conn, one of the founders of the
organization.
My airport memory is my fondest memory of him, when we traveled together to Indianapolis, about an hour's drive, to pick up the famous George
Plimpton, the MWW keynote speaker. Plimpton's flight was late, so
Earl and I ended up chatting in the airport for a couple hours until our
VIP arrived. (Read a personal essay I wrote on the experience of meeting Plimpton here.) Earl bought me a pretzel, talked about his years of
teaching and writing and Ball State, and he was also the only person at
MWW who knew the exact location (and claim to fame) of my hometown of
Oakland City, Ind. (That's because he wrote a popular travel column
about Indiana.)
I got news this week that Earl passed away. It's
a great loss for the Midwest Writers Workshop, and he'll be greatly
missed. One of our last conversations was about whether some of his
essays and book ideas should be developed further and taken to
publishers, or whether he should look at independent options. He was a
devoted and energetic writer to the end, and I'll miss his wise and
insightful presence at MWW.
My thanks to Judy Joslin for sending me the above photo of me & Earl at the most recent MWW.
For more that I've written on MWW in general:
Conferences/Events | F+W Life | General
Thursday, September 24, 2009 9:05:24 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Glimmer Train Monthly News
Posted by Jane
Glimmer
Train has just chosen the winning stories for their July Very Short Fiction
Award. This twice yearly competition is open to all writers for stories
on any theme, with a word count not exceeding 3000. Their monthly
submission calendar may be viewed here.
First place: J.P. Lacrampe (pictured above, photo by Ashley Ording) of San Francisco, CA, wins $1200 for
“Farmers’ Market.” His story will be published in the
Winter 2011 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, out in November 2010.
[Photo attached.]
Second place: Stephanie Reents of Providence, RI, wins $500 for
“The Indefinite Article Is a Different Story.”
Third place: James Scoles of Carbondale, IL, wins $300 for “To Cook
an Egg Gently.”
A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.
Deadlines soon approaching!
Best Start: September 30
This
competition is held quarterly and is open only to writers whose fiction has not
appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 3000. Each
submission should be an engaging, coherent narrative, but does not need to be a
complete story, just an important part of a story in progress. Word
count: under 1000. Click here for complete
guidelines.
Fiction Open: September 30
This
competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers for stories with a
word count range between 2000-20,000. No theme restrictions. Click here for complete
guidelines.
General | Getting Published
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 8:54:35 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Tuesday, September 22, 2009
How to Succeed in Today's Publishing Industry (Takeaways from Conference)
Posted by Jane
By noon on Saturday, attendees were commenting that they'd already gotten their money's worth. I consider that a big win!
If you missed the event, you can still get some valuable takeaways:
And most remarkably, Meryl Evans sent me a note to help attendees make sense of what to do next! See below. My big thanks to her generosity.
—
So You Went to the Writer's Digest Conference. What Are You Going to Do Now?
by Meryl Evans
In the Writer's Digest Conference blog, Robert Lee Brewer reported on something he overheard:
So, earlier today, in the hallway, I overheard one writer speaking to another. She said, "I don't have the time to handle all this."
I was not surprised to hear this kind of statement at a conference on publishing and marketing and communicating and podcasting and basically everything we've been going over since Friday. But, of course, I started thinking about how successful writers should be, at least, trying.
Well, after a long pause, she continued speaking to the other (very good listener) writer, "But I have to make the time if I'm serious about making this work."
The writer caught on. Not all of us think about how we're going to make the most of a conference. Or we feel overwhelmed that it paralyzes us preventing us from taking action. We bring home all the notes we took filing them away only to never see them again. Then the least we can hope for is that our brains remembered a few key points while we wrote or typed them and apply them.
Review Your Notes
Take five or ten minutes to look over your notes. You can handle that, right? As you review your notes, pick one to three things you want to use. Post them in your to do list or whatever you use on a regular basis so you can remember and practice. Give yourself a deadline—you're a writer, you can handle it. Check off each item as you do them.
Got 'em all done? Great. Now, go back to your notes to cross them off. Pick one to three more things to try. Repeat.
That wasn't so bad, was it? Turning loads of notes into a couple of doable tasks makes a difference.
Write One Article
You probably walked away from the conference with a few article ideas. Rather than trying to do it all, I pick one topic and write the article within a couple of days after returning home. You can make it a blog entry, an article for your publication, whatever. In writing the article, those ideas will stick with you. Plus, you gain a bonus of sharing that with others.
When you finish the article, revisit the other article ideas and what you can do with them. Rather than feeling spread thin with all your article ideas, you focus on one article at a time while putting the rest away for later. You've captured the ideas on paper or on your laptop. They won't disappear. Well, unless you delete them, lose them or trash them.
Key Points from WD Conference
You can find great tweets from the conference by searching Twitter for WDC09. Here are some highlights worth remembering, captured from tweets and the blog so you don't have to read it all:
- Christina Katz: Platform is everything you do with your expertise. So many tools are available; must prioritize, maximize your time. Do you see yourself as the producer of your writing career and take 100% responsibility for your success?
- Jane Friedman: Platform comes first! Book second. Without a strong platform and topic—creating demand—your book will have a difficult time finding its place in the market. Any changes publishers want to make to the book is what they believe will help increase book sales. They basically want what's economically best for your book—and that's ultimately a good thing.
- Scott Sigler and Seth Harwood: Once you show you can move (sell) books, publishers will take notice. That's why giving away your first book online for free and building up an audience is essential to getting publishers—who have ignored you for years—to wake up and realize your talent and value. "You are the best person to sell your book," says Hardwood.
- Alice Rosengard: Sees organization as a common problem with nonfiction proposals.
- David Mathison (Be the Media) keys: Have a direct relationship with your audience. Control your rights. Repurpose your content.
- Chris Brogan: The best way to get a book published is to not try to get a book published. The whole trick about promoting is to not talk about yourself. Learn to talk about other people. Twitter is not about talking; it's about listening.
- Agent Miriam Kriss: A lot of "overnight successes" are 10 years in the making.
- Agent Panel (Jessica Sinsheimer, Regina Brooks and Michelle Humphrey): Difference between freelanced editing and traditional editor is the latter cares, has a vested interest in the book. Professionally edited, professionally typeset, professionally designed are critical for success via POD.
Agents | Best of Twitter | Building Readership | Conferences/Events | Digitization & New Technology | Getting Published | Guest Post | Industry News & Trends | Marketing & Self-Promotion | Self-Publishing
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 5:33:06 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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Instant Publishing Tools: Getting Noticed & Visible
Posted by Jane
Today I taught an online class about instant publishing tools that can help you get exposure for your work in digital formats. Thanks to all the participants who joined me today. Here's a summary of some of the sites & tools we reviewed (a handy reference for the attendees, as well as a good peek for others on what we discussed).
You can join me for my next webinar on Thursday, covering 3 secrets to getting your nonfiction book published ($99).
Conferences/Events | Digitization & New Technology | Getting Published | Self-Publishing
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 5:20:35 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00) Trackback
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