There has been a lot of messy activity this week involving publishing.
From book festivals having their competition claiming the largest trade space at their festival, to new censorship apps that take out all the bad words in books much to the Author’s dismay, conflicting mishaps are popping up everywhere within the publishing world. To sum up the current issues, here is our weekly Publishing News Roundup:
Twitter is always interesting for the pithy quote on a current news situation.
Clarkson and One Direction: two devastating blows to publishing in the same day
— Philip Jones (@philipdsjones) March 25, 2015
This Tweet comes from the Editor of the UK based Bookseller magazine. On one hand it acknowledges the celebrity nature of publishing current trends, (this enables those other books to be published.) On the other it shows when events/people get messy in public, sales of books plummet.
In other messy publishing news, my Twitter feed is filling with comments about the new censorship app, Cleanreader, which you may download to your reader of choice and run those pesky books through. It will take out and replace all those horrible naughty words that authors unwisely decided to use in their stories.
Joanne Harris (Chocolat) takes issue with the extreme nature of the ‘clean’ being perpetrated and the complete lack of understanding by the App developers of the authors position. (You can imagine Chucks Wendig’s reaction.)
Equally messy is the position of a large Book Festival who have trade space being used by a predator concierge company owned by Penguin Random House. The festival report that they can’t get out of it because then PRH may withdraw their support. It is not a new position in publishing as Dave Gaughran points out.
Publishing is always looking for what the next big trend is, so one eye is always being kept on the tech sector. This week, Joanna Penn gave a guest article on Virtual Reality becoming the next big thing in publishing. Heady stuff.As I was trying to imagine it, up popped these two articles. Picture Book Apps and the vanishing author… with some timely comment and then Publishers Weekly highlighted what Mary Hoffman (author of Stravaganza series) is doing with a multiplatform VR App for kids. Definitely a trend to watch.
Jane Friedman has a guest post from an author who has partnered with a small press. He extols the virtues of working this way.
Bob Mayer looks at the basics for being a successful author now.
Mike Shatzkin has some starter thoughts for publishers to be thinking about on their author websites. (Authors might be thinking somewhat differently tho.)
In the Craft Section,
What does your character want? (Great post)
Character Talents and Skills (from the Angela and Becca’s new Thesaurus)
Critique Etiquette – (Bookmark)
In The Marketing Section,
Two interesting articles from the Book Designer blog – The ultimate guide to Twitter for writers and Quick Book Marketing tips.
In the spoken word realm, Audible wants writers to work exclusively for them… think radio serial style.
Jane Friedman has distilled her Social Media philosophy and it makes for interesting reading. Are you being genuine in your outreach?
Website of the Week
I enjoy dropping into Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog. She writes with passion about the need for authors to keep educating themselves in the industry. This week she highlights how your attitude to writing and publishing can see you have a short career or a long one.
To Finish,
If you are on Twitter you will sometimes see conference takeaways being tweeted. This week the Pubsense conference looked at publishing in the future. The #pubsense15 Twitter stream was full of good comments.
Bookbaby decided to put up a nifty video using Neil Gaiman’swriting advice… Lets take it right back to the reason we write in the first place.
Maureen
@craicer
@craicer
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