Bookbaby, a website that offers print on demand, self-publishing and editing services, has a dozen free guides for authors. These cover a variety of things, such as epublishing, using Twitter, blogging and promoting your book, and are available as PDF downloads here :
http://www.bookbaby.com/free-publishing-guides
(note that they can all be downloaded in one go, by using the link at the bottom of the page)
‘Bo’s Café Life’ is a series of comic cartoons created by Wayne E. Pollard. They take the simple form of coffee cups representing the thoughts and comments of their various writer drinkers.
https://boscafelife.wordpress.com/
Pollard is a writer and cartoonist, and his site was voted one of the best 101 websites for writers in 2013. I subscribe to his daily cartoon, and though it can be a bit hit-and-miss, he sometimes really nails the dilemmas that we writers face. I find myself smiling wryly at cartoons like this:
Some of you may have seen this article by Stephen King, which was in the New York Times in their Sunday Review section:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html?_r=0
It certainly made me think about the relationship between quality and productivity. I created a lot of writing when I jump-started my creativity in June 2013. It was impossible for me not to write, and nine novellas, four short stories and thirty volumes of poetry and song lyrics poured out of me – a literary Mount Saint Helens. 2014 was devoted to writing my first novel, with a few poems thrown in for sanity’s sake.
2015 was spent chasing literary agents, and all I did creatively was write four poems. From 2016-2018, I wrote another four Cornish Detective novels, hoping that a series would be easier to query with than a stand-alone.
All of this activity has given me an appreciation of the fits and starts of some authors’ careers, as well as the production line output of others. It’s always puzzled me how some writers take so long to produce a new novel, while others appear to be one-hit-wonders. Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things, which deservedly won the 1997 Booker Prize for Fiction. Although she announced that she was working on a second novel in 2007, it didn’t appear until ten years later, called The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. That’s not to say that she wasn’t busy, as she wrote many essays and become an advocate and activist for social causes.
At the other extreme is British romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. She wrote more than 700 books, leaving behind 160 unpublished manuscripts on her death at the age of 98. Her worldwide sales are estimated to be anything from 750 million to more than 2 billion copies. You might think that she would have worn her fingers away with this output, but her usual writing method was to lay on a sofa and tell the story to her secretary, who later typed it up. In this way, she created a novel in two weeks.
I’m guessing that most authors are somewhere in between Arundhati Roy and Barbara Cartland in their productivity.
What do you think about the conundrum posed that being prolific means a drop in quality, while taking time produces fine literature?
This article is in today’s Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/24/tablets-apps-harm-help-children-read
My first reaction to the concerns raised is that as long as children are reading something, it’s better than not reading at all. I agree with the worries that tablets could join televisions as being unpaid babysitters that are used to occupy the attention of youngsters, while their parents do other things.
There’s plenty of distractions available on tablets, which might well take a young reader’s attention away from the story. I like it that Gruffalo creator Julia Donaldson took a stand against allowing an app for her book to be created.
The notion that the powers of imagination could be neutered by expecting things to happen automatically at the touch of a button is terrifying to me. Extrapolate that concept far enough, and you’re entering territory where stories are written by computers – which is already happening, of course, as discussed in other threads. Artists, of all types, would become redundant.
I agree with what the UK’s National Literacy Trust’s project manager Irene Picton has to say about books:
“We often forget that books are a technology too, and one that’s had several centuries to evolve. With ebooks or apps, we’re comparing them to a relatively new format for reading. It’s important to be open-minded around this,”
It troubles me that the social aspect of reading a book together can be lost, should the tablet be seen as a solo device. Also, their space-saving capabilities mean that homes will have fewer books on shelves, which also reduces their importance. The tactile qualities of a book make it a friend to the reader, something lacking in a shiny electrical device.
Do any of you have children or grandchildren? It would be interesting to hear some empirical evidence on how youngsters use tablets for their reading.
Some famous writers were rather eccentric in their choices of where to write, with a few needing the reassurance of strange rituals and fetishes to feel comfortable.
I’ve heard of authors writing while standing up, which could avoid some of the health risks of spending ages sitting down, but would surely be tiring. There are lots of retailers selling stand-up desks these days, though I’ve yet to see a bed or bath aimed at horizontal writing.
Haruki Murakami has shared some images of his writing desk and accoutrements. I see that he’s another writer who works with music playing. I rather covet his reading lamps and am currently watching several flexible neck and Anglepoise lamps on eBay. I’m relying on a bedside table light, atop a suitcase next to my writing table for illumination at the moment.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/aug/18/heres-haruki-murakamis-desk-is-yours-as-tidy
I don’t have any lucky talismans around my computer, just a mobile phone, memory sticks and a wristwatch, along with a long-bladed Kitchen Devil knife with a serrated edge that I use as a back-scratcher! I think that this makes me pragmatic, rather than stylish!
Some more writers have shared images of their writing desks on the Guardian’s book page:
I think that I’d find sitting by a window with an attractive view too distracting, especially if I had birds to watch. The nearest window to me is ten feet away, looking out on a car park for the petrol station where I live, so not that attractive an alternative to my laptop screen.
The writers’ desks with views of the natural world made me think of Richard Le Gallienne‘s poem:
‘I Meant To Do My Work Today’
I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me.
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand,
So what could I do but laugh and go?
My old cat Pushkin (after the Russian poet, playwright and novelist) used to love laying on my laptop keyboard, more for the warmth, I think, than attention-seeking.
A book called The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep, written by a Swedish behavioural psychologist and linguist Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin, is currently outselling Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman and Paula Hawkins The Girl on The Train.
It’s sending children to sleep all over the world. Useful to know, should you have a troublesome toddler.
I’ve mentioned Charles Bukowski before, and here’s Tom Waits reading one of his most inspirational poems.
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Called ‘The Laughing Heart’, it should be the mantra for any writer:
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
I’ve just finished re-reading Noah Lukeman’s ‘The First Five Pages’ – excellent, and I recommend it to you.
The book has an epigraph, a poem by Louis Zukofsky, from his major work called ‘A’. As writers querying literary agents and publishers, we should be so lucky to receive such a letter….
Most honorable Sir,
We perused your MS
with boundless delight. And
we hurry to swear by our ancestors
we have never read any other
that equals its mastery.
Were we to publish your work,
we could never presume again on
our public and name
to print books of a standard
not up to yours.
For we cannot imagine
that the next ten thousand years
will offer its ectype.
We must therefore refuse
your work that shines as it were in the sky
and beg you a thousand times
to pardon our fault
which impairs but our own offices.
– Publishers
Former Booker Prize Chairman Professor John Sutherland has come up with a novel idea – condensing the nation’s 25 favourite beach reads into 140 characters for the Twitter generation.
