Lots of links again, so let’s get started! Also, thanks to the Hastings Entertainment Law class for hosting me this morning, you guys asked some really smart questions about the business. But then: you’re law students. Of course you people are smart.
First up: Blog reader plugs! Reader Scott Rhoades has an article called “Great Writing Software That Won’t Coast a Dime” in the May issue of The Writer magazine, which is in stores now. Mira started a blog called Come In Character, in which she offers prompts and writers respond in their characters’ voices, which is undoubtedly a fun exercise. And longtime friend of the blog Ray Rhamey is turning his popular blog Flogging the Quill into a book version, so check that out as well.
This week’s agentfail post at Bookends continues to spark reactions around the blogosphere. Victoria Strauss responds here and Jonathan Lyons here. Both, like me, are surprised at the venom. Only kind of unsurprised too. UPDATE: Jennifer Jackson weighs in here.
And to further respond to yesterday’s post, I understand that agents sometimes fall down at the job and do some things that frustrate and irritate authors. We’re human. But don’t forget that: we’re human. We’re not horrible weeds in the publishing garden. We love our clients, books, and the publishing industry, or else we wouldn’t be here.
Speaking of positivity, Bookends also started an Authorpass and Agentpass appreciation thread. Feel the love!
Thanks to Colleen Lindsay for sending along this hilarious publishing glossary. Sample entry: AUTHOR TOUR: A hazing ritual intended to make authors compliant to their publishers.
In actual book glossary news, Book Roast’s own anonymous publisher breaks down terms like launch and sales conference and discusses how publishers go about allocating marketing resources. An absolute must read if you’re curious about how that process works.
Influential blogger Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo recently bought a Kindle, liked it a lot, and then immediately began considering the potentially scary repercussions and the disappearance of paper books. A really nice summary of both the advantages of e-books paired with consciousness of their perils.
Remember how Klazart/Vineet sent Authonomaniacs into freakout mode when he (legally) brought some of his gamer friends to the site to back his novel? Lauri Shaw has an interview with the man himself.
Via Moonrat comes word that the late Robert Jordan’s last book will be released in three volumes. This is big news to everyone who has read all 7,078,253,278,234 words of the series thus far.
Rachelle Gardner has a fabulous post on 10 things an author should expect out of their agent. Really a great list.
My client Jennifer Hubbard has another great writing post this week about what makes a book un-put-downable (and she should know, her upcoming novel THE SECRET YEAR absolutely falls into that category). She attributes it to a combination of a question to be solved and a compelling voice.
Reader Neil Vogler pointed me to an article that contemplates an interesting new avenue for writing: literary video games?
And finally, friend-of-the-blog Tanya Egan Gibson has a new book coming out called HOW TO BUY A LOVE OF READING, and she recently produced a really cool book trailer:
Have a great weekend!
Nathan Bransford says
jan-
I agree with you there. When agents request material they should respond. I was a little appalled though, at the number of people in that thread who never bothered to follow-up with an agent. We’re dealing with a loooot of manuscripts. Mistakes happen. Sometimes I’ll e-mail people and it goes into someone’s spam filter or they just don’t get it. It’s the author’s responsibility to follow up.
If they follow up and the agent still doesn’t ever write back: bad agent. But if the author never even follows up: bad author.
Marilyn Peake says
Nathan said,
“…the Stanford Prison Experiment, in case anyone is interested in reading more. I took a class from the professor who conducted the experiment,”
Wow, that is so cool that you took a class from that professor. When I was in graduate school, earning my Masters degree in Clinical Psychology, that was one of the experiments that made the biggest impression on me.
Experiments like that one plus the experiments that I conducted for my own Masters thesis made a huge impact one me, in terms of demonstrating how irrationally information can be interpreted and how much mob mentality can influence behavior. My Masters thesis is a 115-page paper entitled An Attributional Analysis of Social Tolerance for Institutionalized Uses of Torture. My thesis advisor and I later presented the results at a Conference of the Eastern Psychological Association. The experiments involved writing newspaper articles in which I varied tiny, insignificant bits of information about fictional victims of torture and then asked each subject to read one version of the newspaper article and answer questions about the victim’s situation, including whether or not they thought the victim was guilty. The results were startling: insignificant types of information influence major conclusions about a person’s guilt or innocence and whether or not they deserve to be tortured. If you’d ever be interested in reading the thesis, Nathan, I’d be happy to send you a copy. The results of that experiment plus reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment and other experiments taught me to always step back, look at how much evidence is really available, and not to jump to conclusions based on limited information or mob mentality.
Jan says
Nathan,
I agree with that, writers need to follow up, but some folks I’ve met have an almost pathological fear of “bothering” agents with follow-ups, especially in light of the long response times some agents actually do have.
Author phobias aren’t the agent’s responsiblity, of course, but do you have a suggestion as to any sort of universal non-pestersome follow up period? I’m not actually looking for an agent as the work I do doesn’t need one, but I do get asked a lot by writers so if you want to venture a good “follow-up rule of thumb” — I’ll adopt it and pretend it’s my advice 🙂
Jan says
Oh, that whole spam filter thing reminds me. I’m in a position where I respond to manuscript submissions for a couple different venues, one of which is a paying market. It drives me crazy when I respond to an email sent by an author and I get a notice that the author will NOT get my email because I’m not on an approved list…and then gives me the hoops I can go through to be on the list. That is blindingly rude, in my opinion. If you want me to buy and pay for an article, don’t ask me to play games with your spam guards.
Every time I run into one of those, I wonder how many times that author will just never hear back on a submission. There are worse things in the world than spam…and spam filters just might be one of them.