Mar
16
Churchill on Writing Books
Filed Under Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Writing | 1 Comment
The quote below—which I’d never heard until Bill Secrest, Jr., a QDB author and friend, sent it to me—is worth its own blog:
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”
—Winston Churchill
Hot tip: Want to make your writing tighter? Take a look at each time you have used the word “that.” Most can be deleted to your reader’s benefit.
Just a write thought.
Dec
23
Best Book Cover of 2009?
Filed Under Books, Nonfiction | Leave a Comment
A book’s cover isn’t the final factor in whether a book sells well or not, but it does, certainly, play a roll. For one thing, the cover immediately sets the tone, helping the potential reader understand what the book offers. Often one book sells well and publishers copy its design for a similar book.
Have you got a favorite book cover from all those published in ‘09? If so you can upload an image of it to The Huffington Post’s “Photo Poll.”
Out of the ones already up, my vote goes to Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal, Julie Metz’s well-received tale of infidelity. Metz is a graphic artist and designed the cover herself.
Dec
3
Trying to Get a Book Published?
Filed Under Books, Nonfiction, Publishing, Writing | 2 Comments
As you likely know, it’s often tough to get a book published by a conventional publisher. Here you’ve got a great idea and you can’t even get agents or publishers to take a hard look. Then you get your Book-of-the-Month Club catalog as I did this month, and they are offering a book titled “Entertaining Your Indoor Cat” by Kevin Kelley.
Good grief. This fellow Kelley not only got it published, it’s a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Must be someone’s nephew?
Full disclosure: I haven’t even seen this book, it may be the most wonderful book since “Why Cats Paint” which was a big hit about five years ago.
Just a Write Thought.
Oct
24
The New Influencers Gets Late Praise
Filed Under Books, Nonfiction, Promotion, Publishing, Writing | 1 Comment
Publishing is such a strange business. The New Influencers by Paul Gillin, a ground-breaking book on social media that we (Quill Driver Books) published nearly 4 years ago just got a terrific review on the Fast Company blog.
Why is this strange? Because, while we garnnered great reviews from dozens of other venues including the Wall Street Journal, as far as I know, we never could get Fast Company to mention it. Now, 3 plus years later….
Not that I’m complaining too much. In the review, David Capece says “There are many books that have followed in Paul Gillin’s path; however, The New Influencer remains an essential tool for marketers and non-marketers alike.” We at publishing companies like reviewers to call our books “essential.” Even years after they come out.
BTW, it is with the book The New Influencers that Gillin added the term “the new influencers” to the English lexicon, meaning the bloggers and others in social media who are replacing the old influencers such as the mavens on TV, radio, and in print and the ads companies run in those media. Now you see the term used everywhere.
Oct
5
Fair Use Abuse?
Filed Under Fiction, Free Speech, Nonfiction, Writing | Leave a Comment
Here’s a twist. A copyright holder ends up as the one paying in a Fair Use dispute.
With the Fair Use doctrine—a part of the U.S. copyright law—an author is allowed to quote another’s copyrighted material for criticism, commenting, teaching, and other narrow uses. The actual limit on how much can be quoted isn’t defined by the law.
Disagreements are usually settled out of court, but, when a dispute goes to trial, the court generally looks at four things: the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted material, the portion of the work used, and the effect of the use upon the market for the copyrighted material.
In this case, the Estate of James Joyce objected to Stanford University professor Carol Schloss’ use of copyrighted material in a book she was writing. Schloss claimed the material she wished to use fell under the doctrine of Fair Use but took the material out of her book when, she claimed, she was threatened with a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Subsequently she wished to use some of the material in a website and she enlisted the Stanford Fair Use Project to go on the offensive to establish her right to use the Joyce material.
In the end the Estate agreed to pay her $240,000 to settle the case.
This is a reversal of what normally happens when copyright holders attempt to protect their copyrights, and is being hailed by some as better establishing the rights of authors to use copyrighted material in critical works without fear of being sued. In many cases simply the threat of a lawsuit is enough to stop an author from using copyrighted material in any manner, including what may actually constitute fair use.
How does this apply to us?
All of this is interesting, but may lack practical application to the average writer. If you wish to use a large portion of another’s copyrighted material it is still best to ask permission.
To read more on this check out the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society blog or this Publishers Weekly article.
For a good, simple explanation of United States copyright laws see the chapter on copyright by John Zelezny in The Portable Writer’s Conference. (Full disclosure: QDB is the publisher and I’m the editor of the Portable Writer’s Conference.)
Feb
4
The End of Book Publishing Is Near!
Filed Under Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Publishing, Writing | Leave a Comment
I wouldn’t be surprised to find book-publishing pundits walking the streets of Manhattan carrying signs proclaiming “The End Is Near!”
Sales in bookstores are down, heads at publishing houses are rolling, Borders is on the rocks and may not survive, Amazon.com continues to capture market share—its Kindle appears to be the first e-reader to get more than passing traction with consumers.
And, contrary to Chris Anderson’s theory espoused in his book, The Long Tail, the large publishers are still searching for the next blockbuster, the one book that will make a season profitable for the whole house—a tactic that hasn’t exactly served them well, not to say what it does to most of their non-blockbuster authors who don’t get the advance or the attention they deserve. This can’t be the way to develop a robust, heterogeneous industry.
Is this the end of book publishing as we know it?
Yes and no.
Watch for the following in the years to come:
• A proliferation of small, independent houses publishing fiction. As many independent nonfiction houses found their stride in the last 15 years, independents who publish fiction will make gains.
• Kindle will become the iPod of the book industry. Every book published will concurrently be published in the Kindle format.
• Many books will never see the inside of a warehouse. We already have online print-on-demand services (Amazon’s BookSurge is one), but you’ll soon be able to go to your bookstore (or other venue) and have a book downloaded, printed, and bound while you wait.
What does that mean for publishers? Greater distribution—every book available at every bookstore—less warehousing, shipping, and remainder costs, the economic freedom to publish more titles—blockbusters or not.
Authors will benefit from all of the above, especially mid-list authors.
Jan
18
Fiction Cheaper than Nonfiction?
Filed Under Books, Fiction, Nonfiction | 1 Comment
I stayed in a motel in San Simeon—home of the opulent Hearst Castle—over Christmas. In the motel lobby are two full bookcases. My kind of place. (By the way, the room was $36 a night for a large, ocean-view room. I went to sleep listening to the relaxing sounds of the surf. E-mail me and I’ll tell you the secret of getting the same.)
One book in the lobby, the 1947 novel Mountain Time by Bernard DeVoto, had been rubber stamped on the inside cover. It read:
This Book is the Property of
THE MAY COMPANY
No Membership Fee
Time Limit on All Books
THIRTY DAYS
Non-fiction [sic] 3¢ a day 8¢ Minimum
Fiction 2¢ a day 5¢ Minimum
Books will be reserved on the payment of
five cents for Fiction and eight cents for
Non-Fiction. This payment covers a
notice to you that the book is being held
for four days from the sending date of notice.
I wonder why fiction was cheaper than nonfiction. Is it today? Are you willing to pay a higher price for a how-to or self-help title than a novel? How about a memoir? Or a political expose?
Jan
16
Narrative Nonfiction Informs and Entertains
Filed Under Books, Nonfiction, Publishing, Writing | Leave a Comment
I recently finished reading True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, a book by Michael Finkel, who was fired from the NYT Magazine for falsifying a story. It’s both his memoir of the actions that lead to his dismissal and the story of a man named Longo who killed his family.
When Longo fled to Mexico after terminating his family, he took the persona of Michael Finkel, reporter. He’d read some of Finkels work and just started saying he was Michael. The FBI wasn’t amused or fooled. He was captured and returned to the States.
The real, unemployed Finkel was staying incommunicado at his home in Bozeman, contemplating why he decided to falsify the story. On the night before the Times was going to go with the story of his firing, his phone rang and it was a Portland Oregonian reporter asking what his connection was with Longo. Finkel had never heard of Longo, but eventually they began a lengthy correspondence.
While, as a journalist, I dislike the liberties Finkel took with his reporting and hope he has discarded this practice, he has written a fine book. A good example of narrative nonfiction.
I think the best way I can define narrative nonfiction is character-driven nonfiction. The author lets the reader see into the minds of the characters as well as letting us see their actions. Along the way, the reader learns of the issues at hand. It makes for entertaining learning. Other great examples of narrative nonfiction are The Perfect Storm, Black Hawk Down, and Indecent Exposure.
At Quill Driver Books, we publish Peter Rubie’s book on how to write narrative nonfiction: The Elements of Narrative Nonfiction. Hmmmm, we were really inventive when we titled that one!
Word for the day: tomicide. The destruction of books.
Jan
6
Choosing the Right Word
Filed Under Nonfiction, Writing | 1 Comment
In his column of January 2nd, New York Times columnist David Brooks writes of the annual Sidney Awards given to recognize some of the best in long-form journalism. One of this year’s awards went to “Professor X,” who, writing in The Atlantic, decried his plight teaching college students today.
Brooks quotes the article in which the professor says the energy and excitement exits the classroom when it comes time to write a paper: “Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Student routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”
Apparently, the professor concludes, this is because his students have done very little reading. He says, “In each of my courses, we discuss…the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desireable…I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I am sure my students do.”
Precision and economy in the words we choose makes our writing sing. When oil lamps lit homes, readers allowed long rambling paragraphs and wordy prose. But today’s readers have the attention spans of my two-year-old granddaughter. Dish them a plate of unnecessary words and all but the most dedicated will put down your piece.
I ran across a couple of excellent, interesting word choices yesterday. A friend of mine e-mailed me that she liked “big weather.” In two words I got what she meant immediately.
And I’m reading Parke Godwin’s The Tower of Beowulf. In it he describes the tracking of a boar: By the depth of the prints in the damp earth, the boar would be of unusual size even for a prime male….
Godwin selected simple everyday words to convey the largeness of the beast —of unusual size even for a prime male—without resorting to more colorful language—behemothic, colossal, cyclopean, elephantine, enormous, gargantuan, gigantic, gross, humongous—which would have raised a different feeling in the reader and not served him as well.
BTW, you’ll never be a great writer until you are a great reader. It’s one of my “Nine Habits of Regularly Published Authors” a presentation I give at writer’s conferences.
Jan
1
Inaugural Post
Filed Under Books, Fiction, Free Speech, Nonfiction, Publishing, Writing | 1 Comment
Ahhh, just what the world needs, a new blog. Especially one dealing with writing and publishing. Heaven knows there aren’t enough of those yet.
My back ground is mostly in journalism and nonfiction book publishing so I suppose nonfiction and books are likely to have an edge in the posts I make. But I love to read fiction—someday I’ll write the Great American Novel—and am passionate about freedom of speech so let’s throw those into the mix as well.
Comments are always welcome.
Well, since it this is my first post and it is also the first day of a new year, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a few predictions about the next five or10 years:
1.) Printed books will not become obsolete. There will still be bookstores in 10 years. You’ll just buy some of your books in other ways.
For instance, sometime in the next five to 10 years, you’ll be buying many of your books from in-store machines that print and bind your selection as you shop—just like the 1-hour photo developing now found nearly everywhere.
This technology—downloading a digital file from a repository of such files and printing one book at a time—will be used by online bookstores to fill their orders too.
All of this will result in fewer books that don’t sell being printed and shipped (today as much as 30 percent of books sold to brick and mortar stores are returned to the publisher where they are pulped or sold off as cheap remainders.) This is good for the publisher’s bottom line and the environment.
2.) Reading devices such as Amazon.com’s Kindle will become as popular as Ipods. We’ll all have one.
3.) Blogging will continue to grow as a news media. From wars in the Middle East to collecting wristwatches, more and more people will get quick updates from bloggers who focus on the same slim slice of the cosmos in which their readers are interested. This isn’t bad. It’s journalism at its most democratic.
4.) Large print newspapers will continue to consolidate or die off, although I think there is room for small, community newspapers funded by local advertisers to thrive.
5.) Writing will still be a tough way to earn a living, but the good will thrive.
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