Whoops! We’ve all had to bite our tongues sometimes….
http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/when-not-to-correct-peoples-grammar-video-goes-viral/107817
Monthly Archives: April 2019
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book View Café
Ursula Le Guin founded an online cooperative of authors, called Book View Café. It’s well worth a look:
I always liked her observation that:
Homme de Plume
After previous comments that I’ve made about pen names, and how some genres of books are expected to be written by men or women, I found this article:
http://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my-novel-out-und-1720637627
A female writer Catherine Nichols experimented with sending her query letter out as a man. She was shocked at the response she received and had the wisdom to extract helpful hints from the comments that got in the critiques.
I Googled her, and found that there’s already a well-known author with the same name, so she might be well advised to find another pen name apart from George Leyer!
How to hoax a book into being a bestseller
After the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman, which became an instant sales success, there’s now a backlash with some readers demanding their money back, on the basis that the novel was misrepresented as being something that it isn’t:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/04/us-bookshop-offering-refunds-for-go-set-a-watchman-harper-lee
Personally, I always though that there was too much marketing smoke being blown around, with barely a fire for literary warmth, when it came to Harper Lee’s first effort at a novel. It made me think of the old warning adage – ‘If a thing sounds too good to be true, it probably is.’
And as Charles Bukowski observed
:
Whatever the literary worth of ‘Go Set A Watchman’, at least it exists. I found a story this morning, via my Quora.com feed, about a best-selling book that didn’t exist at all – until it did!
http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-biggest-media-hoax-in-history
It could be viewed as the ultimate elevator pitch, I suppose, for it roused the interest of enough readers to propel ‘I, Libertine’ onto the New York Times bestseller list.
Unbound – a way to finance your book.
Most of you will be familiar with the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, as a way of raising finance for a new project.
It’s possible to fund the publication of a book with Kickstarter, but Unbound is a relatively new publisher that uses contributions from the public to get literary projects into print. Founded in 2010 by author Dan Kiernan, John Mitchinson, director of research for British panel game Q.I. and Justin Pollard, a historian and researcher for Q.I. Unbound has raised funding for some unusual books. Paul Kingsnorth‘s The Wake made it to the Man Booker prize longlist in 2014, something that wouldn’t have happened without Unbound’s help. It’s due to be made into a film.
How To Land A Literary Agent – free Kindle book
I started re-reading Noah Lukeman’s ‘The First Five Pages’ last night – as excellent as I remember. Noah Lukeman is a highly experienced literary agent based in New York, though he’s not taking on any new clients at the moment.
He’s written a number of well-reviewed books on writing, including ‘How to Land (and Keep) a Literary Agent.’
This is available as a free Kindle edition:
Strunk & White – The Elements of Style – free ebook
It’s my day for finding free ebooks. Strunk & White’s ‘The Elements of Style’ is a widely recommended guide to writing clear and correct English.
It’s available for free on several websites, but Project Gutenberg offers the widest choice of file types:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134
Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
In researching the likes and dislikes of a literary agent this evening, I found an interview with her in which she recommended that prospective clients should consider the shape of their story.
She recommended that they watch this video clip, which features Kurt Vonnegut and an appreciative audience:
This short clip brings up a series of videos with famous authors – not that I’m trying to distract you.
You’re So Vain
I was looking through the articles on books in the Guardian newspaper, finding this interesting piece in the archive about writers and vanity, written by Julian Baggini, a British philosopher.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/feb/25/writers-vain-egotism-julian-baggini
(some great stories on writing beneath this article, and do read the comments section)
One of the first pieces of advice that I’d give to anyone considering writing a book, is to develop a hide as thick as a rhinoceros. Everyone thinks that they’ve got a book inside them, but nobody considers what will happen when the book is released into the wild!
Being an author is setting yourself up as a target for criticism and rejection. These brickbats will come from complete strangers, friends, family, readers, publishers, book-sellers and critics. That’s if they say anything at all, for being completely ignored is the usual fate of a freshly published book. This is why writers welcome adverse criticism, as at least it means that someone has noticed you.
Ego and self-confidence aren’t the same thing. We have to believe that we can write a story, or it simply won’t exist. As Rumi observed:
Being over-egotistical is a sure way of suffocating any talent that one may have. Talent needs cold and clear objectivity to be honed until it’s sharp and bright.
How do you deal with self-confidence, ego, arrogance, hubris, self-belief and vanity?
Writing and Failure
This article from the New York Times is worth a read. Even established authors suffer setbacks and get the blues, so if you’re just starting out difficulties can grow out of all proportion.
I constantly remind myself that if it doesn’t come naturally, then leave it. There’s little value in forcing something into being—things take on the flavour of their creator’s mood.
Setting a writing project aside for a while, and tackling something different, some poetry or a short story might free up the log jam in your mind + you’ll get a kick out of seeing a new piece of work flow freely from your imagination. There’s more than one way down the river of creativity.
