Wishing you the opportunities you crave and the resources you deserve in 2019. Read More
The New Year’s Eve of Time
Leading With Diversity: The #AWP17 Generation Goes to Washington
In its 50th year, AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, returns to the US capital, with special focus on literature in a political society. Read More
Sisters in Crime on Diversity: Multiculturalism, They Wrote
A writers’ support organization with 50 chapters in the US and Canada looks inward to discover who they are. They’re exploring the difficult mystery of diversity in today’s publishing industry. Read More
Freewrite Goes to the Writing Market Touting Mercy for Moderns
Powered by a $342,000 Kickstarter campaign, a “distraction-free” bit of writing technology, the Freewrite, looks a lot like your father’s typewriter. Read More
New Readers & #KathNiel: Wattpad Presents in The Philippines
#KathNiel is the most-searched term on Wattpad in The Philippines. There, Wattpad is known as much more than a huge online reading and writing community. Its arm called Wattpad Presents generates content for film and television productions. Announced in September 2014, the partnership sees TV5 Manila dramatize popular stories from the Toronto-based Wattpad site. The program is heavily… Read More
'Public solitude': No One Can Tell You The Best Way To Create Your Work
Here be ‘unprofessionals’ “Writing offline” seems almost an odd phrase today. You’ll find it—online—in Words Unwired, a commentary by Lorin Stein in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. We understand, of course, when he gets to the even odder term, “unprofessional,” that Stein, The Paris Review editor, is writing in support of the book he has edited,… Read More
Publishing’s Bad Infinity: Authors Guild Calls For Time-Limited Contracts
‘To Keep Pace With The Times’ We believe three basic changes are urgently needed: Time-limited contracts, A clause that provides for reversion of unexploited rights, and A specific new unchallengeable definition to replace historic “out of print” clauses that are not remotely relevant in the electronic age. As you’ll know if you’ve been following along… Read More
Are publishers getting the #authorsay message?
The real irony here, it turns out, is that it wasn’t the publishers calling the questions: 75 percent of responding authors said they have never been asked for feedback from their publisher 7 percent said that publishers pay writers well 32 percent said that the prestige of having a deal with a traditional publisher was important to them… Read More
If the 'Elastic Mind' Snaps: A Lenten Lullaby
“This will be my last post until Monday, April 13, 2015.” No, not me. (You wish.) No, that’s a colleague, the memoirist Kathy Pooler. She’s a good, cold-weather Catholic, mind you, so Lent means a lot more to her than it does to troppo Protestants like me. Following a retreat with some author-colleagues, Pooler has decided… Read More
The winter of our discontent with the ISBN
ISBN: Not much more traction than the first snowfall on London I’m just glad Amazon & B&N do reveal overall sales ranks so we can measure their mix of sales that way. Other retailers, including Apple, do not, limiting us to only estimating the very top books in a limited number of categories on those… Read More