This week… the publishing…
I’m very pleased to announce that my wonderful and brilliant colleague Sarah LaPolla is now officially taking on clients! Check out her bio on the Curtis Brown website, and her genres of interest include literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, urban fantasy, paranormal romance, science fiction, literary horror, and young adult fiction
In volcano news, yes, the publishing industry has been affected by the unpronounceable Icelandic volcano (Eyjafjallajokull for those keeping score), and much travel has been disrupted for the upcoming London Book Fair. The people running the book fair are gamely saying the show will go on, but many a travel plan is in doubt.
Meanwhile, you remember how the NY Times Ethcisist said that it was okay to pirate e-books if you bought the hardcover? Well, @KatieAlender was kind enough to point me to a very curious decision in which the Ethicist rendered nearly an exact opposite opinion when it came to hotel minibars.
The ALA released its list of most-challenged books, and in addition to the usual suspects are some head-scratchers (TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? Really??).
Veteran editor Ann Patty wrote a provocative article wondering if editors should receive royalties, and wonders about the role of editors in the future as the publishing industry changes. Bloomsbury publisher Peter Ginna notes that there are many different arrangements out there, from freelance editors receiving royalties to publishing employees receiving profit sharing considerations.
In book publicity news, Simon Owens looks at the way book publicity is changing in the iPad era, Penny Sansevieri looks at what makes some authors fail, and Joe Berkowitz looks at the curious recent history of books with CONFESSIONS in the title.
Rachelle Gardner has a great reminder about two things every published author should keep track of: your income and your book sales. Don’t get caught by the tax man! Or by the future editor who might want to know your sales numbers.
Reader Leon Sterling pointed me to this interesting article about how some sites are re-thinking and prohibiting anonymous commenting. This is always a topic that I’m evaluating, and sentiment seems to be building against anons.
Who is the richest fictional character of them all? Forbes has a pretty hilarious ranking, and coming in at first place with a net worth of $34.1 billion is Carlisle Cullen. Scrooge McDuck is just behind, with his Number One Dime failing to propel him to the top of the list. (via Haley Walter)
This week in the Forums: which celebrities have you met (and one member’s incredible chess game with a grand master), all your Twitter are belong to the Library of Congress, what to do when new book ideas disrupt your work in progress, how reading habits influence writing, and yes, still trying to figure out what’s happening on Lost.
Comment! of! the! Week! goes to….. Alma, in Monday’s post on handling the query deluge. She has a sure-fire way of filtering out the queries I definitely want to read:
You could run an automated process that would dump them into a database and then run a query against it with the keywords of the SPECIFIC things you’re looking for “(monkey + dinosaur) + protagonist”, say, and a stoplist of the things are you don’t want (“on lithium”, “the next stephanie meyer/jk rowling”). Then you only read the queries with the desired keywords and don’t hit against the stoplist. (And, uhm, yes, repeat offenders’ names could be on the stoplist.)
Monkeys and dinosaurs? Yes, please!!
And finally, yesterday I linked to a video on a cat loving the iPad. Now….. the iPad dog has his own review. Will this Corgi like the iPad as much as the cat? (via GalleyCat)
Have a great weekend!
About anon commenting.. I can see not allowing it on news sites. Politics creates trolls just by its nature: for every opinion or stance there is an opposition, no matter how reasonable it may be.
On a blog like mine, and perhaps yours, comments are not usually so divisive and readers not as likely to go after each other like cats in a sack. Usually.
I always advise my blogging friends to accept anon comments, especially if they use a service like blogger.com or wordpress.com . Yes, people can use OpenID. OpenID sucks. By allowing anon comments, you also allow people to enter in their name and web address rather than just a link to a blog service profile. A definite plus for people who want to subtly invite your readers perhaps become their readers as well.
All of that said, I have noticed that many sites are now using Facebook Connect and Twitter Connect to allow people to log in. That's at least somewhat of a plus, since that would mean one less site at which I needed a password, and being able to send people to my Twitter stream is one small step above sending them to my pitiful bloggerID account.
Nathan, Is your new editor based in NYC or like yourself, in San Francisco?
Thanks, and thanks for all you do for us!
Duh, I meant "agent" not editor.
haverford-
NYC
I'm late to comment on the links, and given the post today, I won't comment at length. But I did want to say that first, this is an extremely interesting assortment of information, and second, I thought your point about the ethicist was very well said.
Thanks for your reply, Penny. Yes, the explanation helps. I was wondering from your yogurt example if you were saying that an informed writer should have been able to anticipate the competition from similar books. And I was wondering how an author can know, when he (to use your publishing example) starts writing a book on dating, that when it's finished, and an agent takes it on, and it's sold to a publisher, and goes through the editing and typesetting and design process, etc., that 3 to 5 years down the line another book on dating by Dr. Phil would be competing with it. Even using the resources that you list, it seems hard to predict that far ahead.
Having the good judgment to delay publication when facing an overwhelming competitor does seem like something that can be gained from being well informed in publishing, but it also seems like something that the publisher would decide, rather than giving the decision to the author.
Donna