‘Your Capacity for Change’ Go slowly. Makes it easier if you take this one line at a time: Authenticity is equal to your unique voice, multiplied by truthfulness, plus your capacity for change, multiplied by range of emotional impact, raised to the power of imagination. This is the “Authenticity Formula.” It opens designer and author Marc… Read More
Mission Critical At Writer Unboxed’s UnConfab in Salem
Reviewing? What’s Your Motive? Next week, I’ll be leading a session on criticism — “When To Listen And What To Hear” — at Writer Unboxed’s “Un-Conference” event in Salem, Massachusetts…where they know a few things about being critical. That session and this column are not about the more extreme moments in consumer review that have… Read More
'No idea what the hell I was doing': Headline's Ben Willis
Building Bookbridgr to leverage bloggers voices for publishing: “Nothing could have prepared me for how gosh-darn complicated it all is.” And what Ben Willis brought into development at Headline Publishing Group would get even more complicated, just five months after launch: today, his Bookbridgr.com offers book bloggers not only titles from Headline but also from Hachette family Hodder & Stoughton imprints.… Read More
5 Reasons To Pan Those 5-Star Reviews
5 Rights May Not Fix A 1-Star Wrong The absolute deluge of perfect ratings suggests we have a big issue in giving honest literary feedback. Daryl Rothman Author Daryl Rothman wrote a guest post, Are 5-Star Book Reviews Bad For Sales? earlier this summer at the site of author and editor K.M. Weiland. His points bear serious consideration. In… Read More
What Happens When Everybody's a Critic?
Even on the consumer-review level of a site like Goodreads, the presumably smart aspect of a community inclusive both of the writers and their consumers, the readers, is new and evolving. Read More
Writing on the Ether | JaneFriedman.com
It’s springtime for Amazon, and there’s more than one evolving new slant on the massive retailer in play at the moment. Between the monkey chatter and the growls of slow-moving traditionalists, hear it? A skip in the usual drumbeats. A new syncopation in the publishing jungle. Read More
Writing on the Ether | JaneFriedman.com
In a week of sometimes rancorous debate about the actions of the U.S. Department of Justice and the responses from sued publishers, an initially zany-disaster mode has darkened into a more serious tone. It’s a time when no one seems able to just be quiet. Read More
Writing on the Ether | JaneFriedman.com
“What other industries permit agency pricing? In what other sector do you find manufacturers setting the prices and retailers having to, essentially, like it or lump it at a certain percentage?” Read More
Writing on the Ether | JaneFriedman.com
A fifth of surveyed Americans have read an ebook, in a new study just out from Pew Internet; one publisher joins the discussion of authors and agents; Pottermore is off to a bustling start; and still we look for ways to make craft, creativity, and business work together. On the Ether. Read More
Writing on the Ether | JaneFriedman.com
Of course the Pottermore setup isn’t replicable by other authors. But there are parallels with the case of Amanda Hocking. While she and her DIY “vampyre” shtick also stand as unique among writers, her example of self-publisher-invited-in-from-the-cold changes authorial thinking. It’s the same with Rowling: anything but your everyday success, and yet, she has changed things. Read More