Business
A writer whose name escapes me (Rita Mae Brown? Virginia Woolf?) once said, “You only know the book I wrote. You’ll never know the book I meant to write.” That pretty much describes to a T how I’m feeling, having just spent the weekend reading the second set of page proofs of my new book, Heartbreak Town (due out June 26), before FedExing them back to my editor in New York this morning.
For the record, I hate reading page proofs. In fact, it makes me downright frantic. Last chance!, a little voice on my shoulder screams in my ear. Last chance to get it right! Meanwhile, all I can see are the goofs—the places I used the word “just” three times in one paragraph, the chapter in which I unwittingly gave a secondary character a name similar to that of a minor but infamous celebrity.
For the uninitiated, page proofs are what happens to a manuscript after it’s typeset, Xeroxed, and mailed back to the author for perusal. It’s allegedly your last chance to correct really egregious errors, and it comes with a stern warning from a nameless personage at the publishing house that to make extensive changes is at the very least frowned upon and at most, could cost you money. (I’ve never had the latter happen, at least not yet, knock wood.)
Read MoreBefore I got published, I always thought that nothing could be better than actually seeing and holding copies of my books in my hands. I’ve since discovered that fan mail is a close second.
Like many writers working today, I have a website with a form readers can use to contact me with their comments. In the five years since my first book came out, I’ve been lucky in that 99% of the feedback I receive is positive—especially when I hear about writers who regularly get mail that’s not just critical but downright threatening or hateful. I did have the disconcerting experience of receiving, as my very first piece of fan mail, a note from a woman who neatly dissected my book and told me what I should have done differently in a variety of areas. (My response to this was, mentally if not literally, “Why not write your own book, then?”) But for the most part I’ve found that readers don’t usually take the time or effort to communicate unless they like what you’re doing.
Lately, though, for no reason I can discern, my mail has gotten a little strange. For example, I recently heard from a reader who praised the advice about writing on my website and then went on to ask if I could explain how to get a Chicken Soup-type book written and published, how much she could expect to receive as an advance, how many weeks it would take from the time her manuscript was accepted by a publisher for it to appear in bookstores, and how soon she’d be able to quit her day job.
Read MoreIt’s that time of year again: Time to gather receipts and hope you actually brought in more than you spent on writing! Here are a few links I’ve culled from here and there (many from Authors and the Internal Revenue Code by Linda Lewis
Writers Guide to Taxes by Linda Adams and Emory Hackman
Profit vs. Pleasure: Rules on Losses
How Long to Keep Financial Records
TAXES AND THE WRITER at Publish Lawyer
A Home Business and Taxes article by Teresa Stone
Here are a few links specific to freelancers as well. Good tips within that can apply to any kind of writer:
Read MoreWe’re all just dying to know the name of the final HP book, right? I know JK Rowling’s fans have been begging her for the title as a holiday gift. And guess what? She finally obliged. (Thank you, JK). The next title will be called…
Read MoreBarry Cunningham is the Publisher and Managing Director of The Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books in the world. Barry Cunningham has personally discovered some of the biggest names in children’s fiction today, including J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter series) and Cornelia Funke (Inkheart, Dragonrider). He recently spoke with Writer Unboxed about his journey as a publisher, discovering Harry Potter and much more. We’re deeply honored to have him with us.
Part 1: Interview with Barry Cunningham
Q: Tell me a little about yourself. How did you start in the publishing business and what has your journey been like?
BC: I started in marketing children’s books. I traveled the UK with Roald Dahl, among other people, and really learned the difference between what children respond to and really like, and what they’re told to like. Roald Dahl had a very physical relationship with the whole market. He looked like a big friendly giant, and he entranced people with his storytelling and his writing. His relationship with the children was really about being on their side. Really his message was something that teachers and educators didn’t respond to as much but children understood, and that was: Beware of adults!
So I spent a lot of time working with authors and traveling around with Roald Dahl and just soaking it all in. I really learned my craft about this business by watching children respond to books. Books children love they love almost physically. The books that they love they kind of physically hug and don’t want to give back, and the relationship with the author is part of that.
Though I spent time promoting books for adults early in my career, I was drawn back to children’s books, and when Bloomsbury asked me to do a report on starting children’s list, I thought, “I can do this. I’m not a proper editor, but I know a lot about children’s books.” So I tried for it. I think it was a good decision!
Q: How do you think your background helped you become a successful children’s editor?
Read MoreI was wandering the world wide web months back (pre Nano, naturally) and stumbled upon a whole new word: Blook. What was it? This from Lulu Blooker Blog:
Hmm, interesting. I thought briefly about whether or not I could envision a Writer Unboxed blook. It could be nice, helpful even, to have all our favorite and most useful posts and interviews in one spot. On the other hand, why, really, would anyone want to buy a blook of posts when–with a little patient digging–you can read those same posts for free on the blog? How popular could this “new dawn for the book itself” be?
This from an article at Business Week Online:
Books based on blogs — dubbed “blooks” by Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and creator of the popular BuzzMachine.com — are making a big splash in book publishing. These range from novels to comics to memoirs… Some begin as blogs read by hundreds of thousands of loyal fans, land at well-known publishers, and end up sold through huge retailers from Barnes & Noble to Amazon.com. Others are self-published compilations. All may mean big changes in the way ideas find their way into print.
Recently our editor friend from Flogging the Quill, Ray Rhamey, asked about blooking. Would you be interested in a Flogging the Quill book? My immediate answer was YES. Because pretty much everything that comes out of FtQ is gold, and it would be helpful to have that gold in portable form for easy perusing.
So I’m asking–and Ray’s asking: what do ya’ll think of blooks? Hype or help? Would you use one? How?
Read MoreI have a confession to make: I feel like a total fraud when I talk about what it is to be a writer because 95% of my working life is taken up with being an editor. The writing bit gets squeezed into odd-shaped corners like evenings and weekends, until I have that two-weeks-before-deadline panic and stay home from my day-job flinging my fingers at my keyboard until I have 80,000 words down, hoping they are more or less the right words, more or less in the right order. I have three books published under my own name and another one in gestation (but please can we not talk about it right now because the nearness – okay, the pastness – of the deadline makes me cry). Sometimes I’m a little bit proud of them, sometimes I open one quickly and cringe at the clumsiness of my prose, and sometimes I forget I ever wrote them. As my friend and co-worker Alex says, I have the sin of no pride.
But as an editor, I cannot pass a bookstore without going in to view my precious babies, and saying to my long-suffering companion, Look, I edited that series and that one and this one over here and oh dear they don’t have any of that series but they’ve got this one which is great… I have lost count of the number of books I have edited (close to one hundred Animal Arks alone, which means there isn’t a creature on the planet that I haven’t injured, abandoned or endangered in some way). I have worked on all age ranges, from Rainbow Magic by Daisy Meadows which is aimed at first chapter book readers (4 to 7 years) to Warriors by Erin Hunter which falls into the 10+ bracket. I’m also lucky enough to have experienced pretty much every kind of genre (except horror, which is about to change because I’ve just landed my first 9-12 out-and-out scary project for boys), from fairies and fantasy to medieval detective adventures. So I thought I could offer a few tips on how to get the most from your editor, who will become one of the most important people in your life from the moment you sign the contract. At least, I hope that’s how my authors view me…
Firstly, all writers need editors. Even writers who are editors by day. Like me.
Read MoreEven more than the lives of the feline Clans in Warriors, the YA fantasy line that I edit for Working Partners LTD, adult genre fiction can seem to be all about boundaries, fierce demarcations outlined in the marketing department’s blood. And when genres are mixed, readers know all about it before they even prise open the front cover – it’s romance-meets-thriller, vampire-meets-detective, historical-Western, historical-European, historical-fantasy, sci-fi-vampires, fantasy-werewolves…
Even the shelves in bookstores are assigned to different genres – booksellers must hate when publishers mix it up. Do they do a word count? Right, there are more words about vampires than detectives in this book so that means it goes on this shelf…And when an adult fiction author decides to swap genres, trumpets blare and a crack team of marketing experts is brought out of training in the Florida Everglades to tackle the re-presentation to existing fans. Not so long ago, writers were even encouraged to use pseudonyms when they dipped a toe into (gasp!) a different genre (I’m thinking Joanna Trollope/Caroline Harvey as a case in point).
I’m not going to debate the rightness or wrongness of this – I understand about author branding, reader loyalty, broadening appeal; indeed, in the spirit of this website, breaking out of the box – but my point is that children’s fiction is rarely constrained in the same way. Children’s fiction is a genre (which I don’t think is strictly accurate either, but that’s a blog for another day), and within it writers can swim with relative freedom between fantasy, history, thriller, gritty social realism…
Read MoreNEW YORK – It’s pay back time for disgraced memoirist James Frey and his publisher, Random House Inc.
Under a tentative legal settlement, readers who said they were defrauded by Frey’s best seller, “A Million Little Pieces,” can claim refunds, an agreement called unprecedented — and understandable — by a leading publishing attorney.
…Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said Thursday that he doubted the settlement would set a precedent for similar lawsuits against other books, although he acknowledged it was originally a “concern that passed through a lot of our minds.
Read full story HERE.
Read MoreQuiz time. Who would say this?
What is needed in your queries is only your experience in writing long fiction and not that in writing scripts, poetry or any journalistic endeavors. If this is your first novel, ever, state that and only that in your query. If you have written other novels but they are not the ones you are querying on, please mention them.
Make your guess, then click on down below for the right answer.
Read MoreRight this minute, a battle over who owns the intellectual property rights of fiction writers is taking place in a London court.
Dan Brown, author of mega-seller The Da Vinci Code, is being sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the co-authors of the non-fiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Baigent, Leigh, along with co-author Henry Lincoln, scored a bestseller in the early 1980’s with their theory that the direct descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene live in France. Holy Blood, Holy Grail has been said to inform Brown’s fictional story of his “symbologist” protagonist who discovers the explosive secret. Baigent and Leigh are suing for breach of copyright.
The Google Book Search fracas goes to immediate low the backburner for now. For if Baigent and Leigh win their suit, it puts something into question that fiction writers have been using freely for 500 years: can themes and ideas be copyrighted?
Most legal opinions weighing in on the case say that Brown is standing on firm footing. “You can’t copyright an idea,” says David Hooper, a solicitor specializing in copyright law. Hooper argues that unless Brown ripped off passages of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Baigent and Leigh don’t have a case.
Baigent and Leigh charge that in his thriller, Brown has gone further than appropriating their “theory” that Jesus’ descendants live in Europe. They argue that Brown lifted their entire theory and mapped it onto his own.
You know what? I think they have a case there. Whether or not they will win the suit is another question.
Read MoreThis from USA Today’s blog, “Pop Candy”:
Amazon.com has lauched a feature where authors can connect with fans through blog updates, book recommendations, reviews and more. So far more than 1,000 authors have joined Amazon Connect, including Rick Moody, Elizabeth Kostova and Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox. Moody, by the way, highly recommends Brian Wilson’s SMiLE and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.
Read MoreOver at Publishing News, our friends across the pond discuss the current state of publishing in this ominously titled article:
Random House addresses future with agents
RANDOM HOUSE IS holding a series of meetings with agents to discuss a wide range of issues pertaining to the current and future state of the industry. CEO Gail Rebuck has instigated the initiative, which Gill Coleridge of Rogers, Coleridge & White describes as “admirable – sharing information like this is very helpful”.
Although confidential, it is likely that the polarisation of the industry between the big-name, front list authors, and mid-list or second-rung writers, will be among issues discussed, as well as the implications for all players of an increasing reliance on sales data, something that was ever thus but which is now more important, given the current obsession with market share.”
(snip)
“One agent said that lower advances had been mentioned by two major publishers “because they’re simply not making the money on the books because of everything they’ve given away in discount”.
(snip)
“ Mid-list authors, and even some established writers, are finding it increasingly tough. The emphasis on the top 50 by all retailers “means many good books struggle to make it”, according to Mark le Fanu at the Society of Authors. “Previous sales are determining whether an author gets published again”.
Emphasis mine.
The ‘death of the midlist’ been predicted for the last 20 years or so, ever since Crown Books paved the way for discount bestsellers and the focus on the Top 50. And look where they are now (hint: they went bankrupt). And the midlist still exists, the only difference is, the writer gets paid less.
Read MoreThank god Miss Snark has derailed the increasingly boring discussion of fabulist James Frey and his “con” (which some consider bloody good publicity). Now we can break out the numchucks, because this is going to ignite a storm. Says Snark:
E-books are so not-viable that it annoys the crap out of me that publishers even want the rights, cause they have no useful way to exploit them. However, they learned from the audio book fiasco to hang on to everything they can get their greedy little mitts on so just in case e-books become money machines, the money will be in their coffers not mine.
Basically e-books are gimmicks. Yes people have them, yes, you can buy readers. Yes those people claim they are the wave of the future. No, no one I know actually reads books like this (but I’ll bet this post will bring some of them out of the woodwork).
I bet she’s riii-ight.
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