http://thewritethought.com/blog Thoughts on Writing and Publishing for Authors and Others Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:59:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As a publishing choice, short stories vie with poetry as the quickest way to drain a publisher’s bank account. Yet, a year-old publisher of short stories, Electric Literature, may have found the magic formula. The company’s mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/08/08/electric-literature%e2%80%99s-model-may-save-short-fiction/ Thank goodness market research for writers and publishers includes keeping up on one’s reading. When family members see us sprawled on the couch, book in hand, we can claim, oops, I mean explain, we are working. And, in this endeavor, NPR is here to help. NPR conducted a poll titled “Killer Thrillers” ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/08/05/npr-poll-helps-fiction-authors-and-publishers/ There has been an interesting brouhaha since last Thursday when the Wylie Agency announced plans to launch a digital book publishing venture called Odyssey Editions. Wylie is no slouch of an agency. Odyssey Editions plans to publish e-book editions of some of Wylie’s author’s backlist titles that have yet to be published ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/07/27/literary-agency-as-book-publisher/ Funny how headlines morph as stories move from one newspaper or online media to the next. I usually spend a few minutes each morning reading the Slatest Morning Edition, a daily e-mail that offers a headline and the first few sentences of a dozen top news stories of the day ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/07/20/e-books-already-outselling-p-books/ “If you want to see how a society thinks, look at what it searches for.”                                      —George Bernard Shaw Allow me to slightly rewrite Shaw’s wise counsel: “If you want to know what a society is thinking about, look at what it searches for.” As writers of nonfiction books, magazine articles—even novels—it behooves ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/06/28/to-keep-your-writing-ahead-of-the-curve-use-%e2%80%9ctop-searches%e2%80%9d/ Amazon.com has plans to split their bestseller list into two, one for free titles and one for paid books. This will likely please authors and publishers and add a tenth of a basis point or so to Amazon’s bottom line.  It also points out that “free” isn’t the price point for ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/24/books-can%e2%80%99t-be-free/ Yesterday an elderly gentleman was in my office asking what he should do with his fourth book. He’d paid a “publisher” out of Southern California $25,000 to publish his first book and $5,000 to publish his second. The publisher published the third for free. None of them sold any copies ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/13/can-you-buy-your-way-into-being-a-published-author/ Kobo joins Kindle, Sony, iPad, and Nook Borders, the nation's second largest bookstore chain today jumped into the fight for the e-reading public with a new e-reader from a Canadian company Kobo, Inc (used to be Shortcovers). Borders owns a significant portion of Kobo, Inc. The big advantage over Amazon's Kindle, the ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/08/with-kobo-borders-enters-the-e-reader-fray/ I’ve been researching do-it-yourself video for a presentation I’m giving later this month at the Independent Book Publishers Association's Publishing University. This is hardly an example of what most indie publishers will attain, but it is an example of what you can do with clever people, a home studio, a somewhat hefty budget, and ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/06/something-to-shoot-for-when-you-make-your-book-trailer/ The weeding out of the e-reader/mobile device field has started (continued?) with Microsoft announcing it is canceling further development on its book-shaped, two-page device codenamed Courier. HP’s Slate is rumored to be on the chopping block too. Perhaps something to do with HP bailing out Palm last week. According to this ... http://thewritethought.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/30/dust-already-settling-microsoft%e2%80%99s-courier-tablet-a-fatality-hps-slate-too/