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Feedback and Distortion

September 29, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

In what has turned out to be a nice bit of convergence, I started this post last night (title included), then woke to find a very nice interview of Richard Nash by Guy Gonzalez that helped focus my thoughts.

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed myself hesitating to write a few comments on sites for fear of A) appearing like a self-marketing weasel, and B) appearing like a know-it-all weasel. It’s not so much that I’m trying to pass along anything even remotely controversial, but that, as a writer, I’m intensely conscious of how my comments or feedback may affect other readers’ or visitors’ perceptions. To the extent that all information in a conversation affects the next part of that conversation, these things are inevitable. Distortion in this sense is neither positive or negative: it’s simply the effect of the weight of one’s words on the subject at hand.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Cursor, Guy Gonzalez, reviews, richard nash

An Up-Close Look at the Sausage Machine

September 29, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Imagine for a moment that you can write a story — any length, any genre — and when you are finished you can make it available for the whole world to read. You need a very small amount of money to do this, for computing and technology-related costs. You need some understanding of technology, but nothing prohibitive, and people online will help you learn what you need to learn for nothing other than the satisfaction of doing so.

Hold this idea in your mind and linger on it. You write a story, and the whole world can read it. There is nothing between you and your audience….

Now consider this:

The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial tasks that most editors have to perform, including holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers, fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on — all these conditions taken together make the job of a trade-book acquisitions editor these days fundamentally impossible. The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter, another very old and evergreen publishing story but truer now than ever before.

From the point of view of an author considering doing business with a publishing house, this is the kind of behind-the-scenes look at the book industry that has prevented me, for most of my writing life, from ever really trying to break in. Yes, I’ve made a few attempts, but at some point — and fairly quickly — I’ve realized that the game is so heavily weighted against me that I would be better off buying a lottery ticket.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Daniel Menaker, editors, Publishing, self-publishing

Parallel Publishing

September 29, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

There is word today that e-book publisher Smashwords is partnering with Sony to make Smashwords-published titles available on Sony’s e-book portal (and, by obvious extension, to Sony’s line of e-book readers). With Smashwords’ earlier announcement of a distribution deal making e-book titles available through Barnes & Nobles’ retail stores, it’s clear that the barriers to entry for independent authors in every market are falling by the wayside.

As a writer who wants to reach as many readers as I possibly can, and do so on their terms by supporting the format and technology that each individual is most comfortable with, it seems to me that I am very close to being able to do just that. I understand that there are a lot of issues to be worked out including compatibility problems, standards issues, proprietary attempts to own markets, etc., etc., etc., but from my point of view as a writer I don’t think I need to worry about these issues except to the extent that I need to understand the current offerings in order to exploit them.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: distribution, mark coker, Publishing, self-publishing, smashwords

The Publishing Beat

September 29, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Over the past month or so, as I’ve been learning about the publishing business, one of the things I’ve been looking for is a good writer/reporter who covers the industry. I know where to get wire-service rewrites of industry press releases: what I want is someone who knows the business inside and out.

Today, while digging through some dusty old search results, I came across the name Marion Maneker attached to two different stories from late spring concerning Amazon and its Kindle e-reader. Both were written by Maneker for a site I’ve never heard of — The Big Money — which seems to be a sub-section of Slate.

At the bottom of both stories I found this:

Marion Maneker is the former publisher of HarperCollins’s business imprint.

I don’t know anything about HarperCollins’ business imprint, or even about Marion Maneker. But the Amazon/Kindle stories seemed to be written from the point of view of someone who knew the lay of the publishing land.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Daniel Menaker, HarperCollins, Marion Maneker, Publishing, Random House

Site Seeing: Kassia Krozser | Booksquare.com

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Kassia Krozser is the proprietor of Booksquare.com. I don’t know her, but I feel like I know something about her from reading this post on her site:

Welcome back from whatever you did this summer. Me, I spent my time building a digital publishing company. It went mostly okay, though, in the end, there was no company to show for it.

It’s a smart piece written in the face of real loss, but among the ashes Kassia not only finds useful lessons learned, she takes time to map her own experience onto the broader publishing revolution.

Then again, Booksquare is a quiet site not given to spasms of pop-culture linkage, but rather to more considered thought and analysis of the rapidly evolving book world. Which means it’s my kind of site.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Kassia Kroszer, site seeing

The Agony of Success

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Why do storytellers tell stories? There are as many reasons as there are writers. Here’s a sampling.

One thing I’ve never been comfortable with, however, is a storyteller — and particularly a successful storyteller (however you gauge success) — who talks about how difficult, unbearable, agonizing, hopeless, unrewarding, soul-destroying, righteous, brutal, painful, exhausting or heroic the job of storytelling is.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: storytelling, writers

The Coaching Encyclopedia

September 28, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I had no idea there was anything called a book coach. (Obviously this says something about my own impoverished imagination and lack of initiative, but for equally obvious reasons I would prefer not to dwell on those subjects.)

And I have to say, the questions being asked by the book coach at the other end of the above link are good questions. But I’m still stuck on the idea that book coaches even exist, and I can tell I’m not going to be able to shake free of this new obsession before this post ends.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents

Publishing is for Professionals

September 26, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

As regular readers know, I’m working my way through a very interesting book called The Black Swan, which was recommended to me in the comments. Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s a treatise on the commonsensical idea that it’s not life’s little ups and downs that are the real threat, but rather the bottomless pits that no one anticipates that pose the greater risk.

When I say that the author is smart I’m not condoning the author’s colossal ego, or his tendency to cloak bullying in humor and pranks. But he really is smart: and particularly so in that outside-the-box kind of way that you need to be to make any kind of difference these days. Which is obviously why Random House, a major publisher, decided to publish Taleb’s book, and why the New York Times made the book a bestseller.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: professionals, Publishing, Random House, self-publishing

Piracy is Piracy

September 25, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

There’s a note going around today that 90% of MacMillan’s frontlist (their new books for this year) has been pirated. Predictably, this somewhat less-than-surprising factoid is being exploited by a number of interested parties, including the anti-DRM nuts who are always eager to remind us that DRM doesn’t work.

Well, we know DRM doesn’t work, and probably won’t ever work. But that doesn’t mean the idea behind DRM is wrong.

I also don’t like it when two sides in an argument promote extreme views that intentionally distort reality, then demand that I declare an allegiance. Since the internet first took hold of public consciousness the very question of content piracy and what piracy means has been distorted by two notable and related running battles featuring factions that I don’t respect.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: China, Macmillan, Microsoft, piracy

Squidoo and the Identity-Theft Threat

September 24, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

Speaking of trying to make a buck off of other people’s property, this is pretty impressive:

Rather than convincing companies to set up their own public profile pages for their brands to aggregate and manage online conversations, Squidoo is creating hundreds of unofficial ones (e.g. for Guinness) in the hopes that companies will come to them and cough up $400 per month for the right to develop the page on their terms. Once a company pays up and gains control over the relevant Squidoo lens, the left hand column will ‘belong’ to them.

Obviously Squidoo is smart enough not to use Guinness logos or other branding on the page, but what’s the real intent here? Rather than wait around for some user to put up a Guinness page, Squidoo is priming the pump in the hope that a discussion will get going that Guinness will then feel compelled to take ownership of. It’s a wonderful example of extortion by social-networking proxy, and I can see why somebody thought it was a good idea.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: Seth Godin

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