American Society of Authors and Writers

December's SCRIBE Media Magazine Is Out

2011-12-18T23:55:00.000-07:00

Your new SCRIBE! Media Magazine Basic, for Associate members of AmSAW, has just been released. Check out all the news, writing tips, and other offerings today's busy writer can't do without. And for even more inside information, plus freelance writing gigs, book-and-magazine markets, agency and publisher updates, and all the e-mail contacts you could ever hope to find, upgrade to Professional membership. You can get the inside edge on your competition for only 16 cents a day!

Check us out today. And let us hear from you. We're always ready to help.

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How Can I Keep Focused on My Writing?

2011-12-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

We recently received a question from one of our members:

Q: I have trouble staying concentrated on one project. Do you have any advice on how to keep from jumping from one idea to another? - T-X

We turned to our president, D. J. Herda, for an answer to your question. Here's his suggestion:

A: You can stay focused on a project instead of jumping from one idea to another in one of a couple ways. One is to create an outline, either numbered chapter-by-chapter or point-by-point, and keep writing on that chapter or point until you're finished. Then go on to the next chapter or point. A second way is to set up a deadline, just as you'd have if you were a reporter working for your local newspaper. Give yourself one hour, for example, in which to write everything you can about your subject. If you deviate from the subject or dawdle, you'll miss meeting your deadline and could get fired! Either one of these methods should help get you on track and keep you there! - D. J. Herda

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New eBook Release of Fahrenheit 451

2011-11-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury has finally overcome his longstanding aversion to digital books and authorized an ebook edition of his most famous novel, FAHRENHEIT 451, which Simon & Schuster released Tuesday. The ebook deal comes as part of a new publishing agreement brokered by Bradbury's agent Michael Congdon with S&S that includes all English-language print and digital formats of FAHRENHEIT 451 in North America, and also includes English-language mass-market rights in North America to Bradbury's THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, both of which will be reissued in March. The ebook edition of FAHRENHEIT, originally published in 1953, will be priced at $9.99.

"It's a rare and wonderful opportunity to continue our relationship with this beloved and canonical author and to bring his work s to new a generation of readers and in new formats" said publisher Jonathan Karp in the announcement. "We are honored to be the champion of these classic works." In a telephone interview, Congdon explained that there was an "opportunity to make a new license" for the rights to FAHRENHEIT 451 (Ballantine published the original hardcover edition, while S&S had published the paperback from 1962 onwards) and there was "no way to make new license with anyone that didn't include ebook rights."

The agency then approached Bradbury and explained that any new deal involving the rights to FAHRENHEIT 451 could not go forward without digital rights as part of the package, and "he was willing to go ahead and sign the contract," Congdon said.

While Congdon wouldn't comment on specifics, he says the deal was for "a very significant sum of money." S&S was one of six interested parties who had the chance to bid on the new rights package, "all of whom had, one way or another, some relationship with Ray. If there was a way to grant rights to all six publishers, we would have. But you can't. There's a great deal of admiration for Ray in the publishing industry, which made our job a lot easier."

Congdon said there may be ebook editions of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, but they are under an existing license with HarperCollins, which has so far "honored Ray's decision not to have ebook editions." With FAHRENHEIT's ebook publication, Congdon acknowledged "a door has obviously been opened" for HarperCollins.

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Amazon Signs 'Game-Changing' Publishing Deal

2011-11-15T11:58:00.001-07:00

Guru Deepak Chopra has become the highest-profile author yet to sign book deal with Amazon. The self-help author has found yet another key to spiritual enlightenment: become the latest in a string of big name authors to sign a deal for megabucks with Amazon.com.

Amazon has moved aggressively into publishing over the last year, signing major writers including bestselling self-help author Timothy Ferriss and actress and director Penny Marshall – the Marshall deal for $800,000 (£500,000), according to reports – and launching a phalanx of new imprints covering everything from romance to science fiction, each move a further blow to an increasingly nervous community of traditional publishers. This summer it hired former chief executive of the Time Warner Book Group Larry Kirshbaum to run its New York imprint, and Kirshbaum has now clinched a deal for a memoir from Chopra, author of bestselling self-help titles ranging from The Ultimate Happiness Prescription: 7 Keys to Joy and Enlightenment to The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

Sold for a sum reported to be higher than $500,000, Chopra and his medical professor brother Sanjiv Chopra's Brotherhood: A Tale of Faith, Big Dreams and the Power of Persistence will tell how the pair arrived in the US in the 70s with no money, looking at how they fulfilled their dreams today. Literary agent Robert Gottlieb, who negotiated the deal, called it "a game-changer for the publishing industry".
The Guardian

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Thie Day in History: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

2011-11-06T17:55:00.003-07:00

Sharing a birth date with another of the world's most popular literary figures, Fyodor Dostoevsky, is an American pop icon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922, Vonnegut was the youngest of the three children of Edith and Kurt Vonnegut. He is the author of numerous novels, including Cat's Cradle (1963), Hocus Pocus (1990), and Timequake (1997).

Vonnegut's family is of German descent, and both of his parents spoke German in their home, although they refused to teach the language to their son. Vonnegut was born at a time after World War I when many Americans still considered Germany to be evil. Vonnegut said, "[My parents] volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism."

Vonnegut's vision of the fantastic as it occurs in everyday life was influenced by a series of tragic events as a young man. His mother committed suicide on Mother's Day in 1944 while Vonnegut was home on leave. He survived the bombing of Dresden, which killed nearly everyone else. He lost his sister, Alice, to cancer within hours of her husband's death in a train crash. As a result, Vonnegut’s fiction shows an author struggling to cope within a world of tragicomic disparities, a universe that defies plausibility, and whose absurdity becomes food for reality.

When Vonnegut completed high school, his father forced him to go to college to study biochemistry against his son’s will. Vonnegut wanted to be a journalist. He said, "[College] was a boozy dream, partly because of booze itself, and partly because I was enrolled exclusively in courses I had no talent for."

Before long, he found himself failing most of his classes when providence struck. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, offering Vonnegut the perfect opportunity to escape school and join the military.

In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. He was imprisoned in a slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany, and forced to work in a factory that manufactured food supplements for pregnant women. Allied bombers attacked the city on the night of February 13, 1945, setting off a firestorm that burned up the oxygen and killed nearly all of the city’s residents within hours. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners survived because they slept in a meat locker three stories belowground. When they went outside the following morning, they found themselves among few people left alive in a city that had burned to the ground.

Following the war, Vonnegut began publishing fiction about the dangers of technology, but since his work contained elements of fantasy, he was quickly labeled a science fiction writer, and his works were not taken seriously. He said, "I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file drawer labeled 'Science Fiction'...and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal."

It’s easy to understand the sci-fi label. Vonnegut’s first published novel, Player Piano, depicts a fictional city called Ilium in which the people have surrendered all control of their lives to a computer named, ironically enough, EPICAC, after a substance that induces vomiting. The Sirens of Titan (1959) takes place on several different planets, including a thoroughly militarized Mars, where the inhabitants are controlled electronically.

Although obvious sci-fi venues, the super-real settings of Vonneguts fictional worlds serve primarily as a metaphor for modern society, which Vonnegut views as absurd to the point of being surreal, as well as a world peopled by the hapless human beings who struggle against both their environments and themselves.

In Player Piano, the protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus, revolts against the vacuous emotions of a society in which the people, freed from the need to perform any meaningless work, lose all sense of purpose. Proteus joins an underground movement dedicated to overthrowing the computer-run government and takes part in a failed revolution. Although he is imprisoned at the end of the novel, he has triumphed in regaining his humanity.

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965), Vonnegut introduces one of his most endearing characters in Eliot Rosewater, a philanthropic but ineffectual man who tries to use an inherited fortune for the good of humanity. He soon learns, though, that his generosity, his concern for humanity, and his attempts to reach out to his fellow human beings are looked at as madness by a money-conscious society. The novel takes pot shots at everyone, including organized religion, suggesting that the keepers of the faiths use religious doctrine to justify and maintain their power over others.

While writing these early books, Vonnegut kept trying to work on a novel about the bombing of Dresden. Finally, in 1967, he published Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) about a man named Billy Pilgrim who experiences the bombing of Dresden and loses his mind, thinking that he has been transported to a planet where time no longer exists.

Vonnegut said, "[I knew] after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to...I suppose that flowers, when they're through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served."

Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the War in Vietnam, and antiwar protestors saw the author as a hero and a powerful spokesperson. Vonnegut called the work an anti-war book, although he downplayed its influence on society, saying, "Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers." He has since become one of the most popular guest lecturers at universities across the country.

Kurt Vonnegut said, "We would be a lot safer if the government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms...only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of the truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash."

Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries following a fall at his home and died in Manhattan on April 11, 2007.

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It Happened in History: Daniel J. Boorstin

2011-09-30T18:21:00.000-06:00

Daniel J. Boorstin

It's not often that a member of academia breaks out of his field to become a best-selling author, but it happened just that way for Daniel J. Boorstin. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 1, 1914. Raised in Oklahoma, he was graduated with honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and earned his PhD at Yale.

Boorstin taught for years at the University of Chicago, and he has held many teaching positions abroad with stints at the University of Rome, the University of Geneva, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. He was also the twelfth Librarian of Congress.

When President Gerald Ford nominated Boorstin to the position in 1975, the Authors League of America supported him, although the American Library Association objected because he "was not a library administrator." The Senate confirmed the nomination without debate.

During his term as Librarian of Congress, Boorstin established the Center for the Book to encourage reading and literacy. He also spearheaded what became a 10-year project to completely renovate the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, restoring the main building to its original 1897 condition. After retiring in 1987, he was named Librarian of Congress Emeritus.

Boorstin's books have been translated into over twenty languages and have won numerous awards. The Americans: The Colonial Experience, the first in a trilogy of books, won the Bancroft Prize. His follow-up, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, won the Pulitzer Prize; and his third, The Americans: The National Experience, won the Francis Parkman Prize. Boorstin is one of only a few people to have won all three awards.

The author's other works include The Creators, The Discoverers, and Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. Boorstin has won Phi Beta Kappa's Distinguished Service to the Humanities Award and the National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters. Daniel Joseph Boorstin died of pneumonia on Feb. 28, 2004.

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Patterson Writes HOW MANY???

2011-08-19T20:23:00.000-06:00

Who in the world could possibly imagine writing 26 books in 3-½ years? That's what James Patterson and his team of coauthors will be producing for Little, Brown. The publisher recently announced that James and his writers will create 13 adult novels and 13 children's books that will be released through 2014. So if you're struggling to get your first or next book done, just ask yourself, how would James Patterson do it? Maybe you'll get a fresh idea or two. (Like paying several hundred thousand dollars in return for earning several million?)

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"Sorry, I Thought I Loved You" Gets Five-Star Review

2011-07-12T11:26:00.012-06:00

Sorry, I Thought I Loved You

by Michielle DJ Beck
Reviewed by Don Bacue, Executive Editor
International Features Syndicate

Following a foreword by Marcus A. Lindemann putting codependency and relationship addiction into perspective, the book, Sorry, I Thought I Loved You, delves into the lives of a woman by the name of Michielle DJ Beck. I say “lives” because, although married for the first time at the age of 17 and divorced for the fifth time at 34, she experienced different aspects, different generations, of codependency with each of her husbands. In fact, one of few things she seems to have had in common with them was her realization that something was wrong.

Not that she could put her finger on it, of course. She was nowhere near that far enough along in understanding her obsession with relationships. But she knew that she was different, that she didn’t fit in the way others did. That, of course, merely made her increasingly despondent and racked with guilt. What was she doing wrong? Why was she failing her spouses? Or, more realistically, why were they all failing her? In between her five marriages, she suffered similar fates with countless other relationships that never reached the altar.

But where did it all begin? And how did Michielle finally claw her way to emotional freedom?

“It all started early,” Beck writes, “ – as early as I can remember – and it only got worse as I got older. Finally, after many long and confusing years I stumbled, completely by accident, onto a path of research and self-discovery, and today I can finally put a name to the main problem that has tormented me since my earliest memories: I am a codependent relationship addict.”

After reading everything she could find on the subject and talking with professionals in the field, she knew she had a hard, long road to recovery ahead of her. The guilt and shame she felt for not having taking action sooner proved to be a menacing roadblock along the way. So, too, did her fear of sharing her new self-discovery with others. In time, though, she came to a universal realization about codependency addicts.

“They only know that they are unhappy," she writes, "and they think a relationship of some type will make them happy again. When it doesn't, they are lost. They think: ‘Well, I guess I just need a different relationship. That must be what's wrong!’ So they leave their relationship, and they go and find another one, only to repeat the same pattern – a pattern which I finally succeeded in breaking, but only after many years, much effort, and a totally unexpected and unsolicited epiphany, which I promise I'll share with you in a later chapter.”

Obviously, Beck went on to break the chain of addiction, but the legacy of dependency lives on. In fact, after reading her fascinating and hope-inducing work on her life’s struggle to regain a sense of normalcy, I realized that I once shared her addiction. Several broken relationships and failed marriages later led me to my own painful epiphany: I had to change what was broken inside me before I could ever find true happiness with someone else.

How much easier it would have been if, 25 years ago, I’d had Sorry, I Thought I Loved You to guide me through my own tribulations. And just how many other people are there who could benefit from this inspirational and eye-opening tale?

Take my word for it, this is a five-star read from start to finish. Complete with chapter-ending “What the Therapist Says” interpretations and suggestions to put into use PLUS a very impressive “Resources” section. Pick up a copy today. And change your life around for good.

Five stars.

And-a-half.

Sorry, I Thought I Loved You

by Michielle DJ Beck

Chipmunka Publishing (Great Britain, 2011)

Paperback, $21.00

Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars

"They Call Me Doc" Gets Five-Star Reviews

2011-02-06T10:22:00.011-07:00

A Fantastic Journey, by William James "Dare to dream..."
Review of They Call Me Doc: The Story Behind the Legend of John Henry Holliday (Paperback) ***** 5.0 out of 5 stars

As an author, I am intrigued with the writing skills set into this book. D. J. Herda has created a wonderful journey into the historical past to bring the character of Doc Holiday to life. This is good... no, this is a great work.

A Masterpiece of U.S. Western Culture, by Gabriela Sbarcea
Review of They Call Me Doc: The Story Behind the Legend of John Henry Holliday (Paperback) ***** 5.0 out of 5 stars

"You see when a man loses his woman to another man, it is a serious matter. When a man loses his horse to another man, it is unforgivable. But when a man loses his gun to another man, it is inconceivable."

D. J. Herda , in They Call Me DOC, revives the Wild, Wild West through one of its most famous gunfighters, gamblers, and prominent figures, John Henry Holliday, also known as DOC. His voice is alive, vivid, to the point where you think he is sitting in front of you at a table in the dusty old Coral, giving you an account of his entire life over a glass of whiskey. You laugh and cry with him and want the story to go on forever.

This is the very first book written since Gone With The Wind that enticed me to learn more about a highly controversial time, place, and people in U.S. history, where the conflict between North and South lynched mercilessly many innocent lives and divided a nation. Those were the times that nurtured John Henry Holliday, the young man who overcame gruesome health and circumstantial obstacles to become a dentist and use his agile mind in many more ways than one. The southwestern mentality and take on life are powerful and well grounded in the fundamental principle that when the law fails to provide justice, the man steps forth. "The code of the West took precedence over the laws of mere mortals. We had `right' on our side."

But Western justice, guns, and gambling are not entertaining without a "darling whore." Kate, Doc Holliday's love, is a woman of substance, a fact that proudly defies the hazardous prejudice attached to one of the oldest occupations in human history, prostitution. There is so much more to this woman than the legend portrays, and D. J. Herda, I mean the DOC, does her "right" by telling us the truth, the formidable nuances of her life and his, that no other source has ever managed to provide to us before.

Oh, by God, I wish the DOC had lived longer! Happy reading!

And from Salon magazine, a reader e-mailed:

I just finished reading your book "They call me Doc" and I just wanted to thank you for writing the best book probably ever written about this great misunderstood man. I love the way you wrote it. It was as if Doc was talking to me through the whole book. I posted it on my facebook page also because everyone that is interested in the history of the old west needs to read it. John Henry Holliday was a good man that was forced into the life that he lived and you brought that out really well. Thanks again for writing this great book.

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It Happened in History: William S. Burroughs

2011-02-05T20:24:00.008-07:00

William S. Burroughs

One of the most influential authors of the Beat Generation was born on Feb. 5, 1914, in St. Louis, MO. Besides being the grandson of the wealthy inventor of the mechanical adding machine, William Seward Burroughs was one of the founders of the Beat movement that included Neal Cassidy, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Burroughs is best known for his realistic novels about drug addiction and drug culture, including Junky (1951) and Naked Lunch (1959).

Burroughs studied English literature at Harvard, which was a calving ground for many of the writers who took their place in the Beat hall of fame. He did graduate work in ethnology and archaeology and worked a variety of jobs during World War II. He was a plain-clothes detective, exterminator, advertising copywriter, factory worker, bar attendant, and waiter.

While drifting from job to job, he met Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg in New York City around Christmas 1943, shortly after Ginsberg began studying at Columbia. Burroughs impressed them with his scholarship, as well as his sardonic sense of humor and the reserved poise that often comes with a wealthy birthright.

Older than the others in the group, Burroughs took on the role of father figure and mentor, encouraging Kerouac and Ginsberg in their attempts to write fiction and poetry. He felt a special affinity toward them because they were kindred spirits, dreamers, fantasizers. He said, "There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks."

Early in his writing career, Burroughs collaborated on a humorous sketch with a Harvard classmate, Kells Elvins, and on a short Dashiell Hammett-style novel with Kerouac, but publishers rejected both works, and Burroughs began to doubt his own literary talents. His continuing search for an identity led him to seek out the criminal elements in society.

Hoping to fit in with a "community of outlaws," he began buying stolen goods, including morphine, and in 1944, he became addicted to the drug. In 1947, he moved in with Joan Vollmer, another member of the group around the Columbia campus, and she gave birth to their son, William S. Burroughs, Jr. Joan, too was an addict, making Benzedrine her drug of choice. The couple moved to New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico City in order to obtain their drugs more easily.

In the spring of 1950, Elvins visited Burroughs in Mexico City and talked him into writing a factual book about his drug experience as a "memory exercise." Burroughs set a daily schedule and mostly kept to it with the help of daily injections of morphine. He finished the project in December and titled his book Junky. He sent the manuscript to Lucien Carr in New York. Finally, Ginsberg obtained a copy and was able to get the book published as a pulp paperback in 1953 under the pseudonym "William Lee." The cover sported the lurid subtitle, Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict.

On September 6, 1951, Burroughs accidentally killed his wife at a party while attempting to shoot a martini off her head with a pistol. He was stoned, and the bullet penetrated her forehead, killing her instantly. He was taken into custody and charged in Mexico City with criminal imprudence. His parents took over the care of William Junior and brought him to their home in Florida.

Released on bail, Burroughs left Mexico and traveled throughout South America looking for a drug called yage. His letters to Ginsberg describing his experiences in the cities, jungles, and mountains of Ecuador and Peru were collected in a volume later published by City Lights as The Yage Letters (1963). Burroughs thought the pieces would interest the same readers who had made Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) so successful.

After Burroughs left South America, he settled in Tangier, where he found he could live cheaply and obtain the drugs he needed for his very survival. His wife's death created in him a type of literary urgency. He felt that he had been possessed by an invader, "the Ugly Spirit," who controlled him at the time of the accident and maneuvered him into a lifelong struggle, "in which I have had no choice except to write my way out."

In 1957, Kerouac visited Burroughs in Tangier and began to type the hundreds of handwritten pages of Burroughs' new book, which Kerouac titled Naked Lunch. Afterwards, Burroughs said he was "shitting out my educated Middlewestern background once and for all. It's a matter of catharsis, where I say the most horrible things I can think of. Realize that--the most horrible dirty smelly awful niggardliest posture possible...."

Burroughs continued to work on the book until its publication in 1959, thinking of it as a picaresque novel narrated by his alter ego, "William Lee." His biographer, Ted Morgan, understood that Burroughs shared the "New Vision" of the writer as an outlaw, creating a "literature of risk." The compression and urgency of Naked Lunch in "the fragmentation of the text is like the discontinuity of the addict's life between fixes....For Burroughs sees addiction as a general condition not limited to drugs. Politics, religion, the family, love, are all forms of addiction. In the post-Bomb society, all the mainstays of the social order have lost their meaning, and bankrupt nation-states are run by 'control addicts.'"

After leaving Tangier in 1957, Burroughs traveled to London to enroll in apomorphine treatment--still banned in the U.S.--for his drug addiction. The treatment failed, and he slipped back into his more familiar ways.

Burroughs found the English literary scene to be terminally depressing. "England has the most sordid literary scene..." he said. "They all meet in the same pub. This guy's writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They're all scratching each other's backs."

Burroughs published several more novels, including Queer, which he wrote in 1951 but wasn't able to get published until 1985. The book shared the same protagonist as Junky, but the homosexual subject matter--although handled honestly--was considered in poor taste and kept the book from being published at the time.

Burroughs kept a daily journal with three separate columns in it. In one, he wrote what he was doing. In the second, he wrote what he was thinking. And in the third, he wrote what he was reading. He carried with him notebooks, news clippings, and photographs, as well as scissors, paste, and a tape recorder--all of which he considered part of his writing tools.

"In my writing," he said, "I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas...a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed."

In his later life, Burroughs moved to a small two-bedroom cottage in Lawrence, KS, where he lived with his cats. He took up painting and collage, turning out abstract works of art characterized as expressive surrealism.

Devoted to truth in all the arts, Burroughs said, "So cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

William S. Burroughs died in Lawrence at 6:50 p.m. on August 2, 1997, from complications of a heart attack he had suffered the previous day.

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It Happened in History: Dalton Trumbo

2010-12-09T20:30:00.005-07:00

On December 10, 1905, screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo was born to a family living in Montrose, Colorado. His father, Orus Bonham Trumbo, soon after moved the family to Grand Junction. There, in the blue-collar town a stone's throw from neighboring Utah, the elder Trumbo worked at several occupations--from shoe salesman to beekeeper--all without much success.

When young Trumbo entered high school, he began writing for the Daily Sentinel, the local newspaper. He entered the University of Colorado in 1924, but when his father died the following year, he moved to Los Angeles to help support his mother and two younger sisters. He worked for nine years on the night shift at a bakery, leading him to observe, "I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of."

While working evenings, Trumbo also enrolled in classes at the University of California and at the University of Southern California. His first stories and essays appeared in Vanity Fair, and in 1932, he began contributing to the film magazine, the Hollywood Spectator. Trumbo left the bakery business for good when the magazine offered him a position as managing editor.

Trumbo's debut as a novelist came with the publication of Eclipse in 1935. It was a satire in the spirit of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (1922) about a self-made businessman, John Abbott, who challenged a backward and introverted society. The work was a thinly veiled satire of life in Grand Junction as Trumbo saw it. That same year, he was hired as a reader and a screenwriter by Warner Brothers, and his star was on the rise.

Trumbo wrote 21 screenplays in the next six years, many of them low-budget remakes for the B-picture units at Warner Brothers, Columbia, and RKO. Trumbo's adaptation of Christopher Morley's novel, Kitty Foyle, a story about a working girl and her troubled love life, won an Oscar nomination.

Despite his success as a screenwriter, Trumbo was determined to become a first-rate novelist. The inspiration for his anti-war epic, Johnny Got His Gun, came after he'd read an article about a British officer who had been gravely disfigured in World War I. The story covers the thoughts of a soldier who has lost his arms, legs, face, sight, and hearing and decides to become an educational exhibit about the horrors of war. He believes that the people who come to see him "would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing, to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that's in newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere, a war between a man and a high explosive shell."

Trumbo made his debut as a film director when he later turned the story into a movie. It won several awards at Cannes but did poorly at the box office in the U.S.

In 1938, Trumbo married Cleo Fincher. They bought a ranch, named the Lazy T, at Lockwood Valley, a short drive from Hollywood. During World War II, he served as a war correspondent with the U.S. Army Air Force. In his script, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, starring Spencer Tracy (1944), he managed to tell a lavish story without the racist tones so prevalent in the day.

Trumbo joined the Communist party in 1943. He said the meetings were "dull beyond description, about as revolutionary in purpose as Wednesday-evening testimonial services in the Christian Science Church." Nonetheless, his experimentation in social awareness eventually cost him dearly. In 1947, he was summoned before Joseph McCarthy's House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to answer questions about the pervasiveness of communism in Hollywood. He refused to cooperate and was cited for contempt of Congress. He was convicted of the charge and, as a member of the "Hollywood Ten," spent nearly a year in a federal prison in Kentucky. Afterwards, he sold his ranch and moved to Mexico, where he continued to write scripts under various pseudonyms.

Ian McLellan Hunter said that Trumbo wrote the original story for William Wyler's film, Roman Holiday (1953), starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. "He asked me to front for him," Hunter later said. Hunter received an Academy Award for the story and turned his fee from Paramount over to Trumbo.

This blacklisting is going to collapse because it is rotten, immoral and illegal. I am one day going to be working openly in the motion picture industry. When that day comes, I swear to you that I will never sign a term contract with any major studio. I will, proudly and by preference do at least one picture a year for King Brothers, and I will try to make it the best picture that I have it in me to do." - from Trumbo's letter to the King Brothers, in The Penguin Book of Hollywood, ed. by Christopher Sylvester, 1998

With the help of director Otto Preminger, Trumbo broke off the blacklist in 1959 and was hired to write the screenplay for Exodus, based on Leon Uris's bestseller. More screenwriting credits came with The Sandpiper, perhaps better remembered for its song The Shadow of Your Smile than for its stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Another Trumbo film, Hawaii (1966), was based on James Michener´s best-selling novel.

In a 1970 speech to the Screenwriters Guild, Trumbo reflected upon the horrible years of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee investigations and of Hollywood blacklisting.

"The blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.

"When you who are in your forties or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - right, left, or centre - emerged from that long nightmare without sin."

The tumultuous life of Dalton Trumbo came to an end on September 10, 1976, when he died of a heart attack.

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Google eBooks Officially Launched

2010-12-06T08:23:00.001-07:00

Google's long-awaited, long-promised ebook service begins rolling out today in the United States, unveiled in a blog post by product manager Abe Murray, leaving behind its pre-release moniker of Google Editions and now known simply as Google eBooks--one sign of how the world has changed since the web giant first started discussing selling "perpetual online access" to books in 2006. As previously indicated by the company, they expect to launch in other territories in early 2011. The new ebookstore is located at books.google.com/ebooks, but it is launching "throughout the day," so we are advised that not all visitors will necessarily see the new store right away. Similarly, the apps, web reader and reseller ebookstores--all described further below--will start to appear today, though the precise timing is unclear.

Google declares they have "the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than 3 million titles," including "hundreds of thousands of books for sale from publishers" as well as "millions" of public domain titles, with the latter provided for free. People familiar with the catalog estimate the copyrighted works at between 300,000 and 400,000 titles, though Google is not providing a specific number.

While the reviews will come later, in its scope, scale and ambition the program clearly puts Google in contention as a major ebooks player here in the US and shortly in major markets around the world. Google executive Tom Turvey says they are "hoping to capture the full breadth of the book business" with a catalog that incorporates trade books as well as STM, scholarly and professional works. The starting collection also reflects "international diversity," with "multiple languages represented." They are offering both reflowable EPUB files, as well image-based files (when provided by publishers) with a toggle that will show such books--including color titles--"as they exist in print." Turvey underscores, as publishing people will appreciate, that "it's actually meaningful to see how the book was intended to be laid out."

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New Data on eBook Sales

2010-11-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

The AAP reported their monthly industry sales statistics for September, including eBook sales compiled from 12 publishers (including the big six). They show sales for the month of $39.9 million, ahead of August's $39 million, but behind July's $40.8 million. (Insiders warn not to make too much of the accuracy surrounding these monthly numbers, based upon how data is accumulated by publishers).

With total trade print sales of $489.5 million for September, that makes eBooks 7.5 percent of sales overall for the month. The total of $304.6 million in sales for the year so far comprises 8.2 percent of total trade sales of $3.705 billion, as recorded by the AAP.

With last month's announcement of Nook Color and Nook Kids, along with a wave of other initiatives aimed at ramping up the children's market, we were interested in where the children's eBook market is now--and what percentage of adult sales (rather than overall sales) have shifted to eBooks.

Based on percentage breakdowns supplied to by many reporting AAP publishers, in September adult eBooks comprised 9.5 percent of all adult trade title sales. Children's eBooks, on the other hand, comprised only 1.6 percent of all children's trade sales.

Overall print trade sales for the year are down 7.5 percent (or $276 million) through September, compared to a year ago. Inclusive of eBooks, however, the trade market is down a more modest 2 percent.

It Happened in History: Margaret Mitchell

2010-11-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

November 8, 1900, marks the birthday of a woman whose own life reads nearly as dramatically as her most famous book. Margaret Mitchell, a native of Atlanta, wrote Gone with the Wind, a book that was very nearly never published but, in fact, ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for the author in 1937.

Mitchell's mother was a suffragist. Her father was a prominent southern lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society. She grew up listening to stories about the Old South and the battles that the Confederate Army had fought around Atlanta during the Civil War. As she grew older, she loved being the center of attention. She said, "If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it; or, well, I'd be a prize fighter — anything for the thrills."

After being graduated from Washington Seminary, Mitchell studied medicine at Smith College. She adopted her mother's feminist leanings, clashing frequently with her father's conservatism. But she lived the Jazz Age in full and reported on it in her article, "Dancers Now Drown Out Even the Cowbell" in the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine.

"In vain," she wrote, "the leader of the jazz band may burst blood vessels in his efforts to make himself heard above the din of the Double Shuffle and the Fandango Stomp, the newest dances introduced to Atlanta's younger set. Formerly we had a vast respect for the amount of noise a jazz band could produce. Now we see it is utterly eclipsed."

Mitchell had numerous suitors when she was young. She fell in love with a man who went to fight in World War I and never returned. When Mitchell's mother died in 1919, Margaret returned to keep house for her father and brother. In 1922, she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, who turned out to be a cruel husband with a violent temper. The disastrous relationship was climaxed by spousal rape and was finally annulled in 1924.

Mitchell began her writing career as a journalist in 1922. Using the pseudonym, Peggy, she wrote whatever she thought her Atlanta Journal readers would enjoy--articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews about beauty pageants, summer getaways, hospitals, prison cells, and whatever else that crossed her mind. She also contributed to a popular gossip column called "Elizabeth Bennett."

Mitchell remarried in 1926, shortly before developing a stabbing pain in her ankle. She couldn't walk, so she took a leave of absence from the paper and holed up in her apartment. She passed the time reading books. After reading everything she could get her hands on, she decided to write a book, herself. She wrote Gone With the Wind, beginning with the last chapter and working her way back in time. The book tells the tale of Scarlett O'Hara, an aristocratic woman born on a plantation into the genteel life. By the end of the war, she loses everything she owns.

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin - that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia sun." - from Gone with the Wind

At the end of the book, Scarlett pleads with the man she loves, Rhett Butler, who tells her that he is leaving her. She tells him that she doesn't know what she'll do if he goes away, to which he responds with one of literature's most celebrated lines, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Mitchell wrote the book on a sewing table and stuffed each section into a large Manilla envelope. She wouldn't admit to anyone that she was writing it. She said, "I fought violently against letting even a close friend read as much as a line." If someone walked into the room, she would throw a bath towel over her typewriter.

It took Mitchell nine years to complete her book. In 1935, editor Harold Latham visited Atlanta. When she met him, he said that he had heard she'd written a novel. She felt shy and told him that he was mistaken. Soon afterward, a friend told her, "I wouldn't take you for the type who would write a successful book. You know you don't take life seriously enough to be a novelist ... I think you are wasting your time trying."

She was so furious with the comment that she went home and grabbed the manuscript. She ran back to Latham's hotel and caught him just as he was packing for a train back to New York. Latham liked it, and the book was published by MacMillan in 1936. Comparable in length to Tolstoy's War and Peace, it ran over a thousand pages in length and sold millions of copies. It broke all previous sales records. The New Yorker praised it, and poet and critic John Crowe Ransom admired "the architectural persistence behind the big work" although he criticized it for being overly Southern, particularly in its treatment of Reconstruction.

Malcolm Cowley's disdain in his review came partly from the book's popularity. John Peale Bishop dismissed the novel as merely "one more of those 1,000 page novels, competent but neither very good nor very sound." Regardless, in 1937, Gone with the Wind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. And in 1939, the movie adaptation appeared, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It won 10 Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture.

Margaret Mitchell died in Atlanta on August 16, 1949, after being struck accidentally by a speeding car while crossing Peachtree Street. Lost Laysen, a lost novella by Mitchell written when she was 16 and given to her close friend, was published posthumously in 1995. The romance was set on a South Pacific island.

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It Happened in History: Sam Shepard

2010-11-05T20:56:00.006-06:00

November 5, 1943, marks the birthday of enigmatic actor and playwright Sam Shepard. Born Samuel Shepard Rogers VII in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, he was the son of an Air Force career man who had been a bomber pilot in World War II. After the war, Rogers moved his family around between various army bases until he decided to retire and try his hand at ranching. The family raised sheep and grew avocados on their property in Duarte, California, where Shepard watched his father's slow, methodical decline into alcoholism.

Shepard entered San Antonio Junior College, where he intended to study agriculture. But fate intervened when, a year later, he joined a touring troupe of Nomadic thespians. "That was one of the most exciting times of my life..." he said. "We never spent more than one or two nights in the same place, and our stages were always the altars of churches... We crisscrossed New England, up into Maine and Vermont. The country amazed me, having come from a place that was brown and hot and covered with Taco stands. Finally we hit New York City and I couldn't believe it. I'd always thought of the 'big city' as Pasadena and the Rose Parade. I was mesmerized by this place."

He was mesmerized, as well, by the stage. At the age of 19, he supported himself by serving tables at the Village Gate while pursuing his theatrical interests. His first complete play, the autobiographical Cowboys, received a favorable review in The Village Voice. The bug had bitten. Hard.

Shepard gradually built his theatrical reputation upon a series of one act-plays produced in off-off-Broadway theatres. He worked at experimental spots like La Mama, Cafe Cino, the Open Theatre, the American Place Theatre, or any company he could find that would produce his work. He shared an apartment with the son of jazz legend Charles Mingus, who once remarked that, whenever Shepard wasn't reading Samuel Beckett or working, he would go into his room with a ream of paper, close the door, and emerge some time later with the same box of paper, holding a new play.

In 1971, Shepard told an interviewer, "I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star..." Regardless, by the time he turned thirty, he had more than 30 New York productions to his credit.

Shepard's early plays were innovative, influenced by early experiments as a rock musician. His settings are often a type of No Man's Land on the American horizon, his characters, typically loners and drifters caught between a mythical past and the technological present. His works often explore the relationships within deeply troubled families. In 1979, his Buried Child, dealing with the deterioration of the traditional American family, won the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1983, Shepard divorced his wife and began a relationship with actress-producer Jessica Lange. Two years later, he adapted his play, Fool for Love, into a script and starred in the film with Kim Basinger and Randy Quaid. Shepard's A Lie of the Mind (1986), a poetic look at the American West, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. That same year, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his works from the 1990s are Simpatico (1994), which he started to write while he was driving to Los Angeles, and Cruising Paradise (1996), which contains 40 short stories exploring the themes of solitude and loss of angry and anguished men.

After a hiatus of 20 years, Shepard directed his play, The Late Henry Moss (2000) in San Francisco at the Magic Theatre. It starred Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, and James Gammon. The play is about the conflict between two brothers and their dead father. Since then, Shepard has gone on to become the most widely produced American playwright in history. His latest play, God of Hell, came out in 2004.

Sam Shepard said, "The work never gets easier. It gets harder and more provocative. And as it gets harder you are continually reminded there is more to accomplish. It's like digging for gold. And when you find the vein, you know there's a lot more where that came from."

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Amazon To Publish Short Writing

2010-10-12T11:07:00.001-06:00

Word comes from Amazon that it's looking once again at publishing writing that is shorter than conventional books. Here's the corporate press release:

Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century--works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated--whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch "Kindle Singles"--Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today's announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

"Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. "With Kindle Singles, we're reaching out to publishers and accomplished writers and we're excited to see what they create."

Like all Kindle content, Kindle Singles will be "Buy Once, Read Everywhere"--customers will be able to read them on Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, Mac, PC, BlackBerry, and Android-based devices. Amazon's Whispersync technology syncs your place across devices, so you can pick up where you left off. In addition, with the Kindle Worry-Free Archive, Kindle Singles will be automatically backed up online in your Kindle library on Amazon where they can be re-downloaded wirelessly for free, anytime.

To be considered for Kindle Singles, interested parties should contact digital-publications@amazon.com.

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New Larsson Book Confirmed

2010-10-11T09:20:00.002-06:00

Remember that mysterious, unpublished, unconfirmed manuscript of the fourth book in Stieg Larsson’s best-selling “Millennium” series? It’s actually the fifth book, according to an article in the New York Times. So said Larsson’s brother, Joakim, in an interview on CBS that was broadcast on Sunday, Oct. 10.

The author, Stieg Larsson, died in 2004 before his books were published.

“I got an e-mail from Stieg 10 days before he died, where he said that book four is nearly finished,” Joakim Larsson said in the interview, which also included his father, Erland.

“To make it more complicated, this book No. 4 — that’s book No. 5,” he added. “Because he thought that was more fun to write.”

The disclosure — should it be true — adds another turn to an already twisty personal story that is nearly as complicated as the plots of the Swedish crime mysteries that Larsson wrote.

The first three books of the “Millennium” series, beginning with “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and ending with “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” have become a publishing phenomenon, with tens of millions of copies in print. Larsson did not live to see the books published; he died of a heart attack in 2004, at the age of 50.

The author had said he intended the series to consist of 10 books, and he was working on a manuscript when he died.

Under Swedish law, control of his estate went to his family, rather than to Eva Gabrielsson, his longtime companion. Gabrielsson, who is reportedly in possession of a laptop containing the manuscript, declined to comment to CBS.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, the American publisher of the “Millennium” books, said he believed the unpublished manuscript existed but did not know whether it was intended to be the fourth book or the fifth.

Whether it will ever be published is another question. Depending on the plot and substance of the story, it is possible that it could work as the fourth book in the series, even if it had been intended to be the fifth.

According to CBS, the Larssons said they would not allow the book to be published.

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It Happened in History: Graham Greene

2010-10-02T09:22:00.006-06:00

Henry Graham Greene, English novelist, journalist, and playwright, was born on October 2, 1901, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The fourth of six children, he was an awkward and painfully shy youth. He had no inclination toward sports, and he often cut school so that he could read adventure stories such as those by authors Rider Haggard and R. M. Ballantyne. Such stories influenced him greatly and helped to shape his literary style.

Although many of his works combine elements of the detective story, the spy thriller, and the psychological drama, Greene's weightier novels are mostly stories of the damned. His heroes eventually are forced to face their shortcomings and arrive at salvation only after a long period of suffering and soul-searching agony.

Greene began his life in England, the son of Charles Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, who was a first cousin to author Robert Louis Stevenson. Greene's father, a brilliant intellect, became headmaster at Berkhamsted School. Originally, he had intended to become a barrister, but he discovered that he enjoyed teaching more, although his history lessons were often less lessons than diatribes on why Liberalism had failed society.

Young Greene was educated at Berkhamstead and Balliol College, Oxford. Plagued by debilitating insecurity, he tried running away from home several times. In his teens, he attempted suicide. His parents took him to a therapist who encouraged him to start writing as a means of developing a stronger self-image and a more positive outlook on life. He introduced Greene to several of his literary friends.

Greene quickly learned that he had a natural talent for writing, and during his three years at Balliol, he published more than sixty poems, stories, articles, and reviews, most of which appeared in the student magazine, Oxford Outlook, as well as in the Weekly Westminster Gazette. In 1926, he converted to Roman Catholicism, saying afterwards, "I had to find a religion... to measure my evil against." When critics began exhuming the religious undertones in his works, Greene complained that he hated the term being hung on him: "Catholic novelist."

In 1926, Greene moved to London, where he went to work as a reporter for the Times (1926-30) and for the Spectator, where he was a film critic and a literary editor until 1940. There, he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning.

She had been a secretary at Blackwell's publishers and wrote to Greene at Oxford, chastising him for his article linking cinema, sex, and religion. The two met for tea and fell in love, although Vivien was slower to yield to Cupid's arrow than was Greene. He began courting her with a letter of apology.

"You carry magic with you always," he wrote her at the beginning of their courtship, "it is in your eyes, & your voice, & your long dark hair, & your whiteness." Vivien, though younger and sexually inexperienced (quite the opposite of Greene), was cooler and more sophisticated when it came to love and kept him at a distance.

The two finally married in 1927. Their relationship spanned two decades, ending with a separation only when a bomb during the Blitz destroyed their lovely and thankfully empty home at 14 Clapham Common, Vivien having already been evacuated with the children. She was terrified at the thought that Greene might have been in the house, but he was secretly living with his paramour, Dorothy Glover, and escaped harm. In an interview, Vivien said later, "Graham's life was saved by his infidelity."

After their relationship ended, he had a string of mistresses, including in the 1950s Swedish actress Anita Björk, whose husband, writer Stig Dagerman, had committed suicide a year earlier. In 1938, Greene began an affair with Dorothy Glover, a theatre costume designer; with whom he would remain close until the late 1940s. She started a career as a book illustrator under the name of Dorothy Craigie, writing children's books of her own, including Nicky and Nigger and the Pirate (1960).

During World War II, Greene worked "in a silly useless job," as he said afterwards. He was in intelligence for the Foreign Office in London, under Kim Philby, who would later gain notoriety for his defection to the Soviet Union. On one mission to Africa, the writer found little to write home about. "This is not a government house, and there is no larder: there is also a plague of house-flies which come from the African bush lavatories round the house."

Greene returned to England in 1942 and, following the war, traveled the world as a freelance journalist, living for extended periods in Nice on the French Riviera. With his anti-American comments, he gained access to some of the world's major Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos. But English novelist Evelyn Waugh, who knew Greene better than anyone else, assured in a letter to a friend that the author "is a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is cover.'"

Without bothering to end his affair with Glover, Greene began a simultaneous affair with a stunningly beautiful Catholic convert, Catherine Walston (right), in 1946. Walston was also Greene's goddaughter. Greene met her when, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she asked him out of the blue to be her godfather, a ceremony witnessed by Greene's wife, Vivien. He was 42 and internationally celebrated for novels such as The Power and the Glory. She was 30 and the mother of six children.

Greene met Walston, fell in love, and then sustained a long and passionate affair which was conducted with the full knowledge of all members of both families. Harry Walston himself came to be utterly and helplessly complicit in the relationship. Greene dedicated The End of the Affair to his paramour. In the book, a writer is having an affair with a neighbor’s wife. He and the neighbor have a strange friendship, as did Greene and Catherine’s husband. When a German bomb hits the building where the lovers are meeting, the woman spontaneously prays to God that she will change her life if only her lover is not dead. Amazingly, he is not. But this sets off a titanic tug-of-war in several characters’ souls about the relative claims of human and divine love.

The End of the Affair was a scandalous success, so much so that some Catholic wags complained that it gave the impression that Christ had said: "If you love me, break my commandments." Greene and Walston were certainly active in doing that. He began rationalizing the affair, going so far as to get confirmation from some priests that it was all right to go to confession again, even knowing that he would immediately return to the illicit liaison. Greene’s earlier sense of the acute tension between earthly and heavenly impulses gradually slid into a more lax form of Catholicism better suited to his own personal lifestyle.

Greene termed his more popular contemporary thrillers--works such as Orient Express (1932) and The Ministry of Fear (1943)--mere “entertainments” in an attempt to set them apart from his more serious fiction. His light-hearted romps through populist literature were mostly inspired by his own experiences in the British foreign office in the 1940s and his lifelong ties with SIS.

As both agent and writer, Greene is a crossover between authors such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, and Daniel Defoe and more modern day writers such as John Le Carré, John Dickson Carr, Somerset Maugham, and Alec Waugh. The author came by his intrigue with spies and clandestine affairs quite easily. His uncle, Sir William Graham Greene, helped to establish the Naval Intelligence Department, and his oldest brother, Herbert, served as a spy for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the 1930s. Graham's younger sister, Elisabeth, joined MI6 and recruited Graham into the regular ranks of the service.

Greene's most important and enduring works include Brighton Rock (1938), which was also made into a film (right), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951), all of which set a tone of high literary, as well as moral, distinction. While Greene may have dabbled from time to time in "entertainments," the majority of his work marks him as a literary novelist of great stature.

He was also a first-rate journalist, something that some critics attribute to his excelling as a novelist. Many of his novels are set in sites of topical journalistic interest: The Quiet American (1955) is the account of early American involvement in Vietnam. Our Man in Havana (1958), set in Cuba, foretells the coming of the Marxist revolution there. A Burnt-Out Case (1961), in the Belgian Congo, takes place just before that nation's struggle for independence. The Comedians (1966), in François Duvalier's Haiti, unfolds before the dictator's overthrow. The Captain and the Enemy (1980), set in Panama, details the rise and fall of the pre-Noriega nation.

In addition to such timely ventures, the author also displays a marked sense of finely honed comedic value in his short-story collection, May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967), as well as in the novel, Travels with My Aunt (1969). He also wrote several plays, including The Living Room (1953) and The Potting Shed (1957), both thinly disguised religious dramas, as well as The Complaisant Lover (1959), a witty and intelligent play about marriage and infidelity. He is also noted for his short stories, essays, film critiques, and scripts, including the mystery melodrama, The Third Man (1950, above).

Not surprisingly, Greene has been the subject of numerous biographies. When professor Norman Sherry started writing his version, Greene gave him a map of the world, marking all of the places he had visited. Sherry decided to go to all of the spots that Greene had marked. He took twenty years to complete the book. Greene limited himself to writing only five hundred words a day and would stop writing even in the middle of a sentence. Nonetheless, he published nearly one hundred books, plays, and scripts in his lifetime.

Graham Greene died in 1991.

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Book Dump Snarls Traffic

2010-10-01T09:15:00.005-06:00

From Our "Isn't There a Better Way?" Department:

Andrew Marr's latest book is, literally, stopping traffic. Boxes containing 15 British tons (16.8 U.S. tons) worth of the journalist's history volume, The Making of Modern Britain, have been strewn across a busy English road following a recent accident. Thames Valley Police said on Sept. 29 that a truck carrying books overturned approximately 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of London shortly before midnight the night before. The driver suffered cuts to his arms, and the road was closed throughout the night as the books were cleared away.

Video footage on the BBC website showed smashed-open boxes of the book piled by the roadside. The Making of Modern Britain is described by its publisher as "a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the 20th century." Marr, a BBC reporter and presenter, apologized to anyone who had been inconvenienced, and said he hoped the book was not "being taken off to be pulped."

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White House Intel Flop Costs Taxpayers

2010-09-27T09:07:00.007-06:00

From Our "Does It Get Any Weirder than This?" Department

Washington (CNN) -- The Department of Defense recently purchased and destroyed thousands of copies of an Army Reserve officer's memoir in an effort to safeguard state secrets, a spokeswoman for Obama's White House said Sept. 25.

"DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they [sic] contained information which could cause damage to national security," Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham said.

In a statement to CNN, Cunningham said defense officials observed the September 20 destruction of about 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's new memoir, "Operation Dark Heart." The cost to taxpayers for the action is estimated at nearly $50,000.

Shaffer says he was notified the day before about the Pentagon's purchase.

"The whole premise smacks of retaliation," Shaffer told CNN following White House admissions. "Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous." Even more so, apparently, when an unknown and unspecified number of digital copies are still circulating as eBooks.

"I followed my instructions from the Department of the Army to the letter," Shaffer said. "I even warned DOD that their destruction of these books would only create more demand and increase readership."

Shaffer's publisher, St. Martin's Press, released a second printing of the book that it said had incorporated some changes the government had sought "while redacting other text he (Shaffer) was told was classified."

From single words and names to entire paragraphs--"Even hyphens in hyphenated words," Shaffer said--blacked out lines appear throughout the book's 299 pages.

CNN obtained a memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency dated August 6 in which Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess claims the DIA tried for nearly two months to get a copy of the manuscript. Burgess said the DIA's investigation "identified significant classified information, the release of which I have determined could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security."

Burgess said the manuscript contained secret activities of the U.S. Special Operations Command, CIA, and National Security Agency.

Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said earlier this month that the book had been reviewed by Shaffer's military superiors prior to publication.

"There was a green light from the Army Reserve Command," Zaid told CNN.

But intelligence agencies apparently raised objections when they received copies of the book.
CNN

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New York's "Round Table" Algonquin Changes Hands

2010-09-21T20:22:00.007-06:00

The Algonquin Hotel, the hotel where literary figures of the 1920s held court at the fabled centerpiece Round Table, is becoming a Marriott. The storied landmark at 59 W. 44th St. will become another link in the giant hotel chain this week as the first New York City property in the sprawling Marriott Autograph Collection, according to a Crain's New York Business report.

The 174-room hotel, which opened in 1902, was designated as a city landmark three years ago for its historic relevance as a gathering place for some of the country's most literary notables, including columnist Robert Benchley, New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and quick-witted authoress Dorothy Parker (Men Don't Make Passes at / Girls Who Wear Glasses). The management maintained a steadfast tradition as a comforting haven for artists, even in the face of such guest complaints as lost sleep during Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's work on their musical, My Fair Lady.

It likely won't be the only storied New York City hotel to sail under the Marriott Autograph flag. "We are actively looking for other New York hotels to add to the collection," a Marriott International spokeswoman told Crain's.

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In Death There Is, What? Publishing?

2010-09-15T08:20:00.003-06:00

Little, Brown & Co. recently revealed the cover jacket for The Pale King, an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace due for publication next year. In a PR release, the publisher said the novel, whose cover design was created by Mr. Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, takes place in “an IRS tax-return-processing center in Illinois in the mid-1980s.” It tells the story of “a crew of entry-level processors and their attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium.”

I don't know about you, but I'm going to rush right out and get in my pre-order.

Michael Pietsch, the publisher of Little, Brown and the editor of the novel, added that the author “takes agonizing daily events like standing in lines, traffic jams, and horrific bus rides — things we all hate — and turns them into moments of laughter and understanding.

“Although David did not finish the novel, it is a surprisingly whole and satisfying reading experience that showcases his extraordinary imaginative talents and his mixing of comedy and deep sadness in scenes from daily life.”

Did I say rush right out? I'm jetting to my nearest bookstore.

Little, Brown said it will release the book on – when else? – April 15.

All of which makes us wonder: is there publishing after death? Or simply corporate greed?

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It Happened in History: Dorothy Parker

2010-08-22T22:26:00.005-06:00

On August 22, 1893, an extraordinary event exploded across the universe. On that day, the indomitable, wise-cracking Dorothy Rothschild Parker decided to join the party.

Parker was born and raised in West End, New Jersey, to a Jewish father and a Scottish mother who died when her daughter was only five. The loss initially devastated her, although in time she grew to rely more heavily on her father, who had amassed a small fortune in the garment industry. Father and daughter soon developed a tenuous bond, and Parker shared with him all of the secrets and joys that only a young child can know. Two years later, he married a strict Roman Catholic woman, and trouble loomed in paradise.

Parker disliked her step-mother intensely, and the feeling was mutual. As a young girl, she was enrolled at a Catholic school for girls in Manhattan, later transferring to Miss Dana's Boarding School. Her father told school authorities that she was Episcopalian, although her dark Jewishness marked her as an outsider. She maintained that image of herself--dark, brooding, alone--and in the face of early alienation and disappointment, she developed a biting and irreverent sense of humor to help her cope with her loneliness. Late in life, she described herself as "one of those awful children who wrote verses."

Despite her earliest literary inclinations, Parker left school suddenly at the age of fourteen, never to return, to take care of her ill father, who had once again become a widower.

When her father died in 1913, Parker moved to New York City to seek a better life. She wrote by day and earned money playing the piano at the Manhattan School of Dance by night. Few people who knew her then would have guessed that she would work herself up to become a legendary figure in New York's literary scene, as well as one of the most talked about, revered, and feared critics in literary history.

Parker began selling poetry to the prestigious Vogue magazine at the age of 19 and soon accepted an editorial position there. From 1917 to 1920, she also worked as a freelance critic for Vanity Fair and formed, along with Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, the nucleus of a group they dubbed the Algonquin Round Table, an informal luncheon clique held at New York City's Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Other Round Table members included writers Ring Lardner, James Thurber, and Harold Ross, who created the New Yorker magazine.

Ross said later that he borrowed the tone of voice for his magazine--irreverent, witty, and sarcastic--from those early meetings. Parker was the only female member of the club and often the only woman in attendance.

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania. - from Comment

Parker began her literary career shortly after World War I during an era when slick magazines were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the country. The best writers of the day relied heavily on sarcasm, adopting a sophisticated, wise-cracking tone of voice. Parker soon proved that she could be just as sassy as any man.

An enigma of the day, she stood barely four feet-eleven inches tall. She loved to drink, she loved to dance, she loved to smoke, she loved to swear. And she loved to fall in love with men who didn't love her back. Drama critic Alexander Woollcott described her as "A blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth." Parker replied, "[I'm] just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute."

In 1920, Parker was fired from Vanity Fair because her drama reviews had become too harsh and heartless, so she decided to put her cutting-edge cynicism to work in her first book of poems, Enough Rope, which became a national bestseller when it hit the shelves in 1926. Perfectly suited to the role of the Queen of the Flappers, she bobbed her hair, endured several extra-marital affairs, suffered frequent bouts with alcoholism, and attempted suicide on three (or possibly four, but who was counting?) occasions. Through it all, she somehow managed to maintain the high quality of her writing.

She managed, too, despite her cynicism, to take a lifelong if intermittent interest in political activism. One of those projects would affect her for the remainder of her life. It was her "pet" project, or so she called it--a demand for the release of two Italian immigrants who had been arrested for murder. She brought the project to the Algonquin where she engaged the other members of the club in heated debate. She felt strongly that long-time political anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been set up to take the rap for a crime they didn't commit, and she worked diligently at getting their death sentence overturned. She enticed several other celebrities into joining her, and she was arrested while marching with Robert Benchley and Heywood Broun for the Italians' release.

It was only one of her political crusades that included going to Spain to work against Franco in the Spanish Civil War (the "proudest thing" she ever did), organizing Hollywood screenwriters into a protective guild, and getting blacklisted by the House on Un-American Activities Committee for her leftist social views.

But Parker the Activist had to reconcile herself to Parker the working girl; and, in 1927, she joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine where she wrote book reviews under the pen name, Constant Reader. While she was there, she became famous for her two-line quip,

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

Independent and feisty, Parker--by now an established author--followed up her first book with Sunset Guns (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were collected in Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well (1936). Her works in verse were sardonic, dry, and elegantly written commentaries on lost love or on the shallowness of modern life.

Why is it no one sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah, no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Parker's short stories, which were collected in After Such Pleasures (1932) and Here Lies (1939), illuminated her deep knowledge and understanding of human nature. Among her best-known tales are A Big Blonde and A Telephone Call.

During the 1930s, Parker moved with her second husband, Alan Campbell, to Hollywood where she worked as a screenwriter on A Star Is Born (1937), directed by William Wellman and starring Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, and Adolphe Menjou. She received An Academy Award for the screenplay, along with Campbell and Robert Carson. She also collaborated with Peter Vierter and Joan Harrison on Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1940).

But her success in Hollywood failed to quench her thirst for sardonic wit, much to the chagrin of many big-name celebrities of the day. Once, after meeting Joan Crawford, who was married at the time to Franchot Tone, Parker said, "You can take a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Of the acting talents of Katherine Hepburn, she wrote, "She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B."

When Parker turned 70, she said, "If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are." She also said, "Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."

Much of Parker's best writing was collected in the Portable Dorothy Parker, which has been in print since 1944. Of the first ten Portables published by Viking, only the Portable Shakespeare and the Portable Bible have sold as well and as steadily.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live. - from Resume

Besides her witty limericks, Parker contributed several words and phrases to America's pop vernacular, including bobbed (hairstyle: 1915), queer (homosexual: 1929), bundle of nerves (1915), it's a small world (1915), and what the hell (colloquial: 1923), not to mention the ubiquitous high society, one-night stand, and, appropriately enough, wisecrack.

Dorothy Parker, who once said, "I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true" and "People are more fun than anybody," penned her last sardonic quip on June 7, 1967. She died alone and broken in the New York hotel she had helped to make famous and that had become her final home.

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New Book Draws USA Today Wrath

2010-08-17T13:09:00.001-06:00

Mark your calendars. On Tuesday, the economic downturn ends.

Why? you ask. That's when self-help priestess Rhonda Byrne returns with The Power and a novel solution to everyone's money woes.

It's not a faltering economy or Wall Street that are at fault, according to the author. It's our feelings. "It's the attractive force of love that moves all the money in the world, and whoever is giving love by feeling good is a magnet for money," Byrne writes.

So stop worrying about that foreclosure notice or the 29% interest rate on your credit card and perk up, people! "You can tell how you feel about money, because if you don't have all you need, then you don't feel good about money," she writes.

But before you snicker and Google that P.T. Barnum quote about suckers, remember that Byrne's previous opus, 2006's The Secret, sold more than 19 million copies in 46 languages. Oprah Winfrey, among others, embraced the Australian TV producer's revelations about the "law of attraction." Boiled down, the idea is to open yourself up to life's goodies — big house, wonderful relationships, fabulous health, all-round happiness — and you'll get them.

The weirdest thing, according to USA Today, is that the author may actually believe herself. Her own narrative is pretty startling. A struggling mom of two reads Wallace Wattles' 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich and ends up as an enormously wealthy media superstar, thanks to her Secret DVD and books.

Her latest tome advises people to be positive and upbeat, believe in themselves, remain open to life's possibilities, and be grateful. Then add the magic ingredient: love.

The problem isn't the self-help genre, the reviewer argues, it's applying the law of attraction to your checkbook. "Byrne is no Suze Orman.

"Another creepy element is the way Byrne digs into the world's religions to pluck out quotes bolstering her crackpot theories about finance. Mother Teresa and St. Augustine are quoted in the money chapter. Quotes from 'Jesus, founder of Christianity,' pop up amid gems such as 'dollar bills want you.'

"With The Secret, Byrne made a fortune off the delusional bliss of magical thinking. Let's not give her any more power."

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Amish Novels Continue Their Growth

2010-08-09T17:33:00.003-06:00

It's plain and simple: The Amish inspirational is one of the fastest-growing genres in romance publishing.

For many readers today, it's all about the bonnet. In our sex-soaked society, nothing seems to inflame the imagination quite like the chaste.

In popular series such as Beverly Lewis' Seasons of Grace, Wanda Brunstetter's Indiana Cousins and Cindy Woodsmall's Sisters of the Quilt,the Amish fall in love while grappling with religious taboos and forbidden temptations.

And it all happens in über-quaint settings brimming with hand-sewn quilts, horse-drawn buggies and made-from-scratch Pennsylvania Dutch specialties such as shoofly pie.

"It's a huge, huge, huge trend," says romance blogger Sarah Wendell, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels.

Who are the Amish? In a 21st-century world, the strictest among them live a 19th-century lifestyle. They are a religious, Christian-based farming community that shuns most modern conveniences such as phones and TVs, and they travel by horse and buggy. They marry among their own faith; the women wear bonnets and modest, drab clothing, the men wear brimmed hats and grow their beards. Children are taught in one-room schoolhouses, and education ends in the eighth grade. Traditional courtship rituals include "Sunday evening singing" group gatherings, where boys and girls can meet. Premarital sex is verboten.

So what is their appeal to modern readers? Remember when Kelly McGillis' modest Amish beauty enraptured Harrison Ford's homicide detective in the 1985 hit Witness? His tough contemporary cop, who pretended to be Amish to protect the widow Rachel Lapp and her young son, saw a whole new world when he lived amid the closed community of barn-raisers and farmers.

With Amish inspirationals, which are shelved under "religious fiction" in bookstores like Barnes & Noble, "readers get to peer inside the Amish community, and it is not like our own community," says McDaniel College English professor Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel. "Simplicity is a hallmark of that community, and simplicity is powerful."
USA Today

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It Happened in History: James Baldwin

2010-08-02T15:58:00.004-06:00

James Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in New York's Harlem, the illegitimate son of a domestic worker. When he was three, his mother married a factory worker, a hard, cruel man who was also a storefront preacher. Baldwin adopted the surname of his stepfather, who died in a mental hospital in 1943.

Throughout his childhood, Baldwin was a voracious reader. When he was 12, his first story appeared in a church newspaper.

At the age of 14, Baldwin discovered relief from his poor surroundings through a Pentecostal church. He was converted and served in the church as a minister for the next three years. It was his experience in delivering sermons that inspired his famous 1953 work, Go Tell It on the Mountain, about a young minister named John Grimes. At the age of 17, Baldwin left home. After being graduated from high school, he worked in several low-level jobs while beginning his literary apprenticeship.

In middle school, Baldwin had taken French classes from poet Countee Cullen, who was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. Baldwin moved to Paris in 1948, where he wrote the famous essay collection, Notes of a Native Son (1955). He lived there for a decade before traveling to London and Istanbul in order to escape the racism he experienced in the United States. He finally returned to America in 1957 to get involved in the southern school desegregation struggle, speaking passionately in support of civil rights and organizing protests. He warned that, until white America changed its attitudes toward blacks, violence would rain across the land. His activities made him a target of FBI investigations, ultimately leading the organization to compile a 1,750-page dossier on the author.

In his second novel, the semi-autobiographical Giovanni's Room (1956), Baldwin exposed a man's struggle with his homosexuality. David, the narrator, tells his story on a single night. He is a young, bisexual American who falls in love with Giovanni, who is to be executed as a murderer, and Hella, his would-be wife.

"But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts," Baldwin wrote, "their lovers and friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life."

Nobody Knows My Name (1962), a collections of essays, explored black-white relations in the U.S., William Faulkner's views on segregation, and Richard Wright's work. Wright had encouraged Baldwin when he was an aspiring writer, although the two never became close.

Although music often played a pivotal role in Baldwin's life, the author had not moved it to the forefront of his writings until Just above My Head (1979), his sixth and longest novel. It focused on the lives of a group of friends who began preaching and singing in Harlem churches. In the book, Hall Montana tells the story of the decline of the gospel-singing career of his brother Arthur.

His next book, Evidence of Things Seen (1983), is an account of the unsolved murders of 28 black children in Atlanta in 1980 and 1981. Although the ambitious work was written mostly as an assignment for Playboy, critics panned it when it appeared as a book, calling it superficial--a charge that Baldwin was forced to deal with throughout his literary life.

In 1983, Baldwin accepted a position as a college professor in the Afro-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Shortly thereafter, he moved to St. Paul de Venice on the French Riviera, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

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It Happened in History: Hunter Thompson

2010-07-18T11:58:00.002-06:00

You could have loved him. You could have hated him. But few people were ever unaffected by him. On July 18, 1939, Gonzo journalism founder Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His father was an insurance agent, and Thompson grew up in a comfortable, affluent southern home.

In high school, he was accepted into a prestigious club called the Athenaeum Literary Association along with many of the city's other wealthy and socially elite young people. But around the same time, Thompson's father took seriously ill and died from a rare immune disorder. His mother had to take a job as a librarian to support the family, and Thompson suddenly became the poor member of his group of friends, the only one who couldn't afford to go to an Ivy League school.

Thompson rebelled against the club and became famous for his outrageous pranks. He flooded the first floor of his high school with three inches of water during an assembly and once dumped a truckload of pumpkins in front of a downtown hotel. He began publishing a series of bitterly sarcastic essays for the literary association's newsletter, including one called, "Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation," signed "John J. Righteous-Hypocrite." He wrote, "Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future. Do you realize you are rapidly becoming a doomed generation?"

Thompson was arrested several times in his senior year for vandalism and attempted robbery. He was banned from the literary association, and he spent thirty days in jail. When he was released, he joined the United States Air Force as a provision of his parole. He spent most of his time in the service writing for the newspaper at his base. He was honorably discharged in 1958 and began writing for any small newspaper that would take him. In his spare time, he obsessively studied his favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, outlining it and rewriting passages. He said, "I wanted to teach my neurological system how it felt to write that kind of prose."

In 1964, the California attorney general issued a report on a dangerous new motorcycle gang known as the Hell's Angels, and the national media picked up the story. Thompson was hired by The Nation magazine to write a brief investigative article about the gang. After his article was published, a publisher called him, offering him fifteen hundred dollars to write a book on the same subject. Thompson was so broke at that point that the electric company had recently shut off his power. He later said, "For fifteen hundred dollars I would have done the definitive text on hammerhead sharks and stayed in the water with them for three months!"

Thompson bought a motorcycle with his book advance and began biking around the country, meeting fellow bikers and writing about them. He was nearly killed one day when five Hell's Angels suddenly turned on him and beat him senseless. But he survived, and in 1967, he published his book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

The first edition of the book sold out immediately and broke onto the New York Times bestseller list, although Thompson had a few problems on the book tour, as he showed up drunk for most of his interviews.

Nevertheless, Thompson soon became one of the most prominent journalists of his generation. In 1969, Playboy magazine hired him to write a piece on Jean-Claude Killy, an Olympic skier turned pitchman. What Thompson produced was the first true piece of Gonzo literature to be published, entitled "The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy."

Playboy turned it down because the editors felt that it was too mean-spirited. In reality, Thompson had stepped beyond the who, what, where, when, and why of mainstream journalism and delivered something quite different: a piece where the writer was not objective but subjective, allowing his own personality and impressions of his subject to emerge. The article eventually appeared in Ramparts magazine, the first magazine to recognize that Thompson was doing something radically new and revolutionary in journalism.

Soon after the Killy piece, Thompson, along with the illustrator Ralph Steadman, were assigned to cover the Kentucky Derby for the magazine. The result was "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," which provided readers with a vicious and, at the same time, hilarious description of the Southern sporting classic. Steadman's illustrations were done in lipstick and were perverse and humorous, well suited to Thompson's own literary style.

In 1971, Thompson published his most famous book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, about a trip he took to that city, how it almost drove him crazy, and his realization that the idealism of the 1960s had disappeared forever. His most recent book is Kingdom of Fear.

Thompson has often written about the drug culture with which he has long been associated, but he once said, "I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway."

A long-time resident of Woody Creek, Col., on the outskirts of Aspen, Thompson received his Doctorate from a mail-order church in the Sixties while he was in San Francisco. In 1970, he ran for the position of sheriff of Pitkin County on the Freak Power ticket and narrowly lost to the incumbent.

Numerous treatments of Thompson's work have appeared in the media over the years. The most recognizable is the "Uncle Duke" character in Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, followed by the cult movie, Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray and Peter Boyle. The most recent is a Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas audio CD and the movie version of the same name, which was released May 22, 1998, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro, with direction by Terry Gilliam.

Thompson once wrote to friend Susan Haselden:

"In brief, I find that I've never channeled my energy long enough to send it in any one direction. I'm all but completely devoid of a sense of values: psychologically unable to base my actions on any firm beliefs. I seem to be unable to act consistently or effectively, because I have no values on which to base my decisions. As I look back, I find that I've been taught to believe in nothing. I have no god and I find it impossible to believe in man. On every side of me, I see thousands engaged in the worship of money, security, prestige symbols, and even snakes. I'm beginning to see what Kerouac means when he says, "I want God to show me his face": it is not the statement, but what the statement implies: "I want to believe in something." The man is more of a spokesman than most people think...and he speaks for more than thieves, hopheads, and whores."

Hunter S. Thompson, 67, in failing health, shot himself in the head at his home on Feb. 20 after a long and flamboyant career.

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What's in a Name? Not Much for PublishAmerica

2010-07-14T19:00:00.008-06:00

Remember what we've always said. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's PublishAmerica.

How dirty and despicable a corporate leech is this company? Would you believe dirty enough to advise the thousands of authors it has taken for a ride over the years to join them in a scam to attempt to fool book buyers into believing that books actually published by PublishAmerica weren't actually published by PublishAmerica?

Huh?

I mean, try to understand the implication here. PublishAmerica knows it has the worst reputation in the history of publishing, so it is openly advocating that its author-victims join them in a scam denouncing its own PA label in deference to a new publishing "spin-off" the company is calling "Independence Books."

And then PA is actually dumb enough (or is that smart enough?) to think its clientelle authors are dumb enough to believe that none of those book buyers is going to catch on to the "change in monikers" scam. Of course, PA is charging its PA authors to change the name and ISBN numbers on their books from PublishAmerica to Independence Books to imply that the books were never paid-for publications through PA but, instead, published through "legitimate" conventional publisher, Independence Books.

What?

But don't take our word for it. Check it out yourself, in PA's own e-mail correspondence to the very authors it has raped time and again over the years. You gotta read it to believe it. 'Nuff said.

From: "support@publishamerica.com"

To: [email address redacted]

Sent: Tue, July 13, 2010 12:57:52 PM

Subject: A new start for your book

Dear author:

Sometimes a book deserves a new start.

Not labeled in book vendor databases as POD.

A low list price.

A new publisher.

Introducing:

Independence Books.

Independence Books is our new subsidiary. It is treated as an independent publisher. Not registered as POD in vendor databases. Not registered as PublishAmerica. Uniform list prices are $14.95.

Want a new start for your book? We will cause it to be published as an Independence Books title. It will receive a new ISBN and the new $14.95 list price. It will not show as POD. It will not list as PublishAmerica. ISBN-fed databases will show that your book is an Independence Books book, readily available from Independence Books.

Go to www.publishamerica.net, find your softcover, add to cart, use this discount coupon: IndyBooks40. Minimum volume is 7 softcovers. For 12 or more softcovers use the IndyBooks45 coupon.

This will cause your book to be published as an Independence Books title. It will no longer be available from us as a PublishAmerica softcover. (Your book's paperback or hardback versions, if already activated, will keep their PublishAmerica designation.) Your order today will be printed under the new Independence Books logo (www.publishamerica.com/independence), with its new ISBN. Transfer may take up to 6-8 weeks to be completed and will be permanent. Book remains under contract with PublishAmerica. Use this coupon for your softcover only; other applications will not be processed. PublishAmerica's online bookstore will re-list the book as an Independence Books title generally within 24 business hours. Other vendors may do so at their discretion.

Thank you.

--PublishAmerica Author Support Team

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Author Jefferson's "Freudian Slip"

2010-07-03T10:17:00.001-06:00

Thomas Jefferson revealed a Freudian slip, according to preservation scientists at the Library of Congress. Even while declaring America's independence from England, Jefferson had difficulty re-training his mind to free itself of monarchial rule.

In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote the word "subjects" whenever he referred to the American people. He then erased that word and replaced it with "citizens," a term he used repeatedly throughout the final draft. The LOC released news of the struck word for the first time on Friday, July 2.

Fenalla France, a research chemist at the Library, said her lab made the discovery last year by using hyperspectral imaging, which employs a high resolution digital camera that compiles a series of images to highlight layers of a document. Some of those layers reveal erased text and even fingerprints that pop into view on a computer screen.

In switching from "subjects" to "citizens," France said it appears Jefferson used his hand to wipe the word out while the ink was still wet. A distinct brown smudge is apparent on the paper, although the word "subjects" is not legible without the help of the digital technology.

"This has been a very exciting development," France said, calling the findings "spine-tingling."
Historic, handwritten documents reveal clues about the past that word processors cannot illuminate, said James Billington, librarian of Congress.

"It shows the progress of his mind. This was a decisive moment," Billington said. "We recovered a magic moment that was otherwise lost to history."

Accompanied by police escort, the document was unveiled outside its oxygen-free protective case for the first time in 15 years for an additional round of hyperspectral imaging. It normally can only be viewed through a 130-pound oxygen-free safe.

Donning a pair of white researchers' gloves, Maria Nugent, director of the Library of Congress' top treasures collection, slowly lifted a piece of off-white corrugated cardboard to reveal the rough draft of the Declaration, which includes handwritten corrections by both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

"That's a pretty good editorial committee," said Billington, who was present for the procedure. The rough draft was written on two sheets of white legal-sized paper, on both sides of the sheets.

The document was returned to the library's vault on Friday after the testing. A copy of the rough draft of the Declaration can be viewed online at http://www.myLOC.gov.

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International Crime Next Publishing Hottie?

2010-07-02T10:50:00.005-06:00

A Nigerian detective unravels a web of corruption, suspecting an inside job when a bomb goes off at the mansion of a rich political candidate. A Japanese physics professor gets sucked into a murder investigation targeting a single mother in Tokyo, and tangles with his old university rival. A Turkish-German investigator in Frankfurt takes on a gang of neo-fascist Croatians involved in human trafficking.

It seems a certain Swedish hacker heroine with a dragon tattoo has paved the way for a surge of international crime fiction.

Spurred by the popularity of Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's trilogy, which has sold more than 40 million copies world-wide, U.S. publishers are combing the globe for the next big foreign crime novel. While major publishing houses have long avoided works in translation, many are now courting international literary agents, commissioning sample translations, tracking best-seller lists overseas and pouncing on writers who win literary prizes in Europe and Asia. The result is a new wave of detective fiction that's broadening and redefining the classic genre.

In the coming months, Minotaur Books, a mystery-and-thriller imprint of St. Martin's, will publish new crime and suspense fiction from Iceland, Japan, Nigeria, South Africa and, naturally, Sweden. A few years ago, most of the imprint's international authors were British.

"A lot of publishers are looking at this because they don't want to miss the next Stieg Larsson," says Kelley Ragland, Minotaur's editorial director.

Some have pegged Japan as the next crime-writing hotspot. Literary agent Amanda Urban of International Creative Management, who represents Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison, took on Japanese suspense and crime writer Shuichi Yoshida, a best-selling author in Japan, because she saw his novels as literary works with commercial potential. "Crime really crosses over," says Ms. Urban.

WSJ

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Author, 82, Lands First Book Deal

2010-06-30T11:46:00.003-06:00

From our "Never Say Never" Department comes news that an 82-year-old woman is celebrating a book deal for her debut novel. Teacher, theatre director, and grandmother Myrrha Stanford-Smith, who lives in Holyhead, north Wales, said she was "gobsmacked" to be handed the three-book agreement, which saw her first work The Great Lie appearing in bookshops last week.

Stanford-Smith, a trained actor, has always had a passion for creative writing. After receiving positive feedback on a short children's story she sent in to BBC Radio Wales last summer, she secured a deal with publisher Honno for a trilogy based around her swashbuckling Elizabethan hero, Nick Talbot.

The adventure reignites, in fictional form, the rivalry between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. The book's 16-year-old Nick, the son of the late first Earl of Rokesby, runs away with a troupe of traveling players who take him to London where he soon comes to Marlowe's attention.

Stanford-Smith said of the deal, "I was gobsmacked. I had to put the phone down and ring them back as I was so taken aback by the whole thing. I had to pull myself together before I could even pick up the phone to call back.

"It was out of the blue. I'd been waiting for the manuscript to be sent back, really, rejected. It was such a wonderful surprise."

Born in Brighton and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama before working with theatre director and impresario Sir Tyrone Guthrie in the West End, the author later moved into teaching and directing.

"It was so lovely to have the book in my hand with embossed cover," she said. "I read it again just for pleasure – to have my book, my words, in my hand as my very own book, it was wonderful. It's on the bookshelves now next to my favourite authors in pride of place with a gap for the next two in the trilogy."

After retiring to Anglesey in the 1990s, Stanford-Smith realized a life-long dream by founding Ucheldre Repertory Company. She still works with the company as both a director and teacher and is currently directing a production of Richard III for production this autumn.

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Books That Sell Themselves

2010-06-28T10:44:00.002-06:00

Daniel Goldin of Milwaukee's Boswell Book Company has some thoughts about books that literally sell themselves. People find many of these books just naturally attractive. Sometimes, they don't know why; othertimes, they know exactly the reason.

"Put a pile of Murder on the Eiffel Tower," he said, "on your paperback table and it will sell. It worked for us in hardcover at Schwartz and in paperback at Boswell.

"We've sold 71 in the last year (for folks in the know, that makes us #1 on Above the Treeline, almost double what the #2 bookstore sold) despite the fact that if they ask, [we] will tell inquirers that the murder does not take place on the Eiffel Tower. The book did win a prestigious French mystery prize (the Michel Lebrun prize) and the hero is a bookseller, which is reason enough to make sure we have enough stock."

Boswell also got the notion to try placing The Power of Kindness from Garrison Keillor's Common Good Books on their front table, and it recently passed the hundred-copy sales mark, which is good by any bookstore's standards. The reason?

"Great title, great package, and the book delivers--what more do you want?" Goldin said. "A concerted effort could get this book on national bestseller lists. Tarcher, the ball is in your court."

Yet another book Goldin thinks is a big-sales sleeper is Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Dr. Who by the Women Who Love It.

"Our purchase started with a special order from our pal Kathy, who suggested an event. Our local contact...rounded up three editors and contributors from metro Chicago, and another from the Twin Cities area. Our event was way bigger than we expected, and we ordered in more stock to cover the bookplates we gave out when we ran out of books."

What's the common denominator? What sets these books apart from lesser selling tomes at first glance? No one knows for sure. But they all have damned interesting titles. Don't they?

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Dutch Gardener Snares Literary Prize

2010-06-23T17:30:00.003-06:00

A "restrained, sparely written" debut novel by a Dutch author and part-time gardener has beaten Marilynne Robinson's Orange prize-winning Home and Joseph O'Neill's Booker-longlisted Netherland to win the world's richest prize for a single literary work, the International Impac Dublin literary award.

Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin, in which protagonist Helmer is forced to return to his family's small farm in the bleak Dutch countryside after his twin brother dies in a car accident, was named winner of the €100,000 Impac prize in Dublin recently. The award is unique in that public libraries around the world nominate titles they think should win. The Twin was proposed by libraries in Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, and Eindhoven, after which an international judging panel selected the winner, this year from a shortlist of eight.

In Dublin to receive his prize, Bakker said he "had to lie down for a while" after hearing that he'd won the award. "It's wonderful," he said. "But for me it was also wonderful to read the book in English. I said to David [Colmer] the translator: 'Who wrote this book?' I didn't recognize it, I thought it was very good. It made me realize it really is a book, and I am a writer." The award money will be divided between Bakker and Colmer.

Acclaimed English author Anne Fine sat on this year's judging panel, which commented that the book "convinces from first page to last.

"Though rich in detail, it's a sparely written story, with the narrator's odd small cruelties, laconic humor, and surprising tendernesses emerging through a steady, well-paced, unaffected style," said the judges. "With quiet mastery the story draws in the reader. The writing is wonderful: restrained and clear, and studded with detail of farm rhythms in the cold, damp Dutch countryside."

The Twin is the third debut novel in a row to win the Impac, following Michael Thomas's Man Gone Down last year, and Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game in 2008. The idea for the book came to Bakker on a holiday in Corsica in 2002. Hiking through the mountains, he had the idea of a son "who was going to do something terrible to his father."

Bakker became a licensed gardener in 2006 and also works during the winter as a skating instructor, but says that these days he makes enough money to be a full-time writer, although he doubts that he'll ever give up gardening. "In the autumn when I rake the dead leaves I can do it for hours – once I even disturbed a pile I'd made so I could go on raking. The sound is so wonderful: it lets you think in a subconscious way, in the back of your mind."

The International Impac Dublin literary award is organized by Dublin city libraries, and is open to novels written in any language, provided they have been published in English. This year 156 titles from 43 countries were put forward by 163 public libraries.

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B & N Offers New Low-Priced Nook

2010-06-21T09:25:00.002-06:00

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Barnes & Noble, Inc., the world’s largest bookseller, is giving book lovers "more choice and greater value in dedicated eBook Reading devices with the addition of NOOK Wi-Fi to the NOOK by Barnes & Noble family for just $149, and a new lower price for its award-winning NOOK 3G at $199."

The new NOOK Wi-Fi offers all the features of NOOK 3G – a color touch screen for navigation and best-in-class E-Ink® display for a great reading experience – plus Wi-Fi connectivity. NOOK Wi-Fi is available online at www.nook.com and www.bestbuy.com.

Barnes & Noble’s new price for NOOK 3G marks the market’s first under-$200 dedicated full-featured eBook reader that offers both free 3G wireless and Wi-Fi connectivity. And Barnes & Noble continues to enhance the eReading experience for all NOOK 3G and NOOK Wi-Fi owners through its latest 1.4 software update, now offering even more places to connect to Wi-Fi for free and faster access to the content they want to read.

NOOK Wi-Fi eBook Reader marries innovative technology and sleek minimalist design with Wi-Fi connectivity. This latest addition to the NOOK family gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the proliferation of both in-home and public Wi-Fi hotspots, where they can browse the Web and shop the Barnes & Noble eBookstore of more than one million eBooks, periodicals and other digital content.

With its latest software update for all NOOK devices (now available at www.nook.com/update), Barnes & Noble is offering all NOOK customers complimentary access to AT&T’s entire nationwide Wi-Fi network, including Barnes & Noble book stores which have previously been available to NOOK customers.

As part of the NOOK eBook Reader family, NOOK Wi-Fi features Barnes & Noble’s breakthrough LendMe™ technology, enabling customers to share eBooks with friends for up to 14 days. NOOK Wi-Fi also offers the same great in-store features like Read In Store™ to browse complete eBooks in Barnes & Noble stores at no cost, and More In Store™, offering free, exclusive content and special promotions.

“People who love to read will find tremendous value with the new NOOK Wi-Fi, the most full-featured, low-cost eReading device on the market, and our bestselling NOOK 3G now at an even lower price,” said Tony Astarita, Vice President, Digital Products, Barnes & Noble.com. “This expanded choice offers best-in-class, best-priced dedicated eBook Readers featuring eBook sharing, access to our vast eBookstore, great free and exclusive content and much more. And with expansion of fast and free Wi-Fi access beyond Barnes & Noble stores to thousands of AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots, we’re bringing additional freedom and flexibility to all NOOK 3G and NOOK Wi-Fi customers.”

NOOK Wi-Fi features:

* Enriched eReading: Enjoy an immersive reading experience with color book covers to browse in your library or while shopping, fast page turns, multiple font choices and sizes and more.
* Dual displays: A fun, easy-to-use reading experience on the familiar paper-like 6” E-Ink display which offers great contrast with no backlight or glare even in bright sunlight, and 3.5” LCD lower color touchscreen for navigation.
* Vast catalog of content: Shop the Barnes & Noble eBookstore for everything from classics to current bestsellers and download your content wirelessly in seconds. There are more than one million eBooks, magazines and newspapers available and free eBook samples.
* Lend to friends: Share a wide range of eBooks with friends for 14 days using exclusive LendMe™ technology.
* In-store experience: Access fast and free Wi-Fi connectivity in Barnes & Noble stores and enjoy the beta Read In Store feature to browse many complete eBooks for free, and the More In Store program, which offers free, exclusive content and special promotions.
* Games, music and Web: Play Chess or Sudoku, listen to your favorite songs or browse the Web to check news and email.
* Light and portable library: About the size and weight of a paperback, the 2GB device carries approximately 1,500 eBooks and offers virtually endless shelf space with expandable memory.
* Your B&N personal library: With Barnes & Noble’s Lifetime Library™, Barnes & Noble digital purchases will be accessible on BN.com and can be enjoyed on the widest variety of devices. Your eBook library goes wherever you go, giving instant access to your existing Barnes & Noble digital library on your NOOK device, partners’ third-party eBook readers and hundreds of computing and mobile devices enabled with free BN eReader software including iPad™, iPhone®, iPod touch®, BlackBerry®, HTC HD2™, PC and Mac®.
* Read for days: Long battery life means you won’t need to worry about recharging. With Wi-Fi turned off, enjoy reading for up to 10 days on a single battery charge.
* Personalize with style: Customize NOOK Wi-Fi with one of the many stylish designer accessories available for all NOOK devices. Customers can choose from a range of classic and colorful accessories designed exclusively for NOOK devices by renowned designers kate spade new york, Jack Spade, Jonathan Adler, Tahari and others.

NOOK Wi-Fi follows NOOK 3G’s stylish design and dimensions and is lightweight (just 11.6 ounces), making it easy to carry in a handbag, briefcase, backpack or suit jacket pocket, just like NOOK 3G. NOOK Wi-Fi also comes with a removable white back cover – NOOK’s is grey – and you can personalize your device from a selection of four additional great back cover colors.

All NOOK 3G and NOOK Wi-Fi customers can also use the included USB cable to connect their device to a PC or Mac to transfer their personal files in ePub, PDF and PDB formats to their NOOK. Based on Barnes & Noble’s open platform and Adobe technology partnership, customers can transfer and read personal files that utilize Adobe’s latest digital rights management or are rights-free. Barnes & Noble’s use of Adobe technology and ePub format also allows customers to read their digital content across a growing universe of devices.

NOOK Wi-Fi is now available for purchase online at www.nook.com for $149 and will begin shipping this week. A bookseller at a Barnes & Noble store can also help customers place an order. NOOK Wi-Fi can also be ordered at www.bestbuy.com. Barnes & Noble expects NOOK Wi-Fi will be in-stock in select Barnes & Noble and Best Buy stores for immediate purchase later this month and rolling out to all stores later this summer.

The latest NOOK software also offers a Go To Page feature, one of the most frequent enhancements requested by NOOK users, which allows customers to jump to a specific page number in an open eBook, an extra extra large font, and performance enhancements to open eBooks even faster.

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Huge "Dragon Tattoo" To Get Bigger Still

2010-06-18T13:20:00.009-06:00

From our "There's Hope for Me as a Writer Yet" department, an article in Entertainment Weekly tells why it is that we keep beating our heads against the wall we call "publishing."

During the summer of 2008, according to EW, movie producer Scott Rudin was hanging out at his house with his partner in the Hamptons. His partner had recently picked up a Swedish crime novel and started reading. “I knew nothing about it,” said Rudin, whose long list of credits includes No Country for Old Men and The Hours. “I asked him if he wanted to get lunch. He told me, sure, in a week. He said, 'Don't talk to me. Don't bother me. I'm reading.’

The book, Rudin learned later, was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Soon, Rudin found himself hooked on the novel, as well, along with its two sequels. “I read it, and I read the second and a while later the third,” he said. “I absolutely loved them. They’re just fantastic stories. I spent about a year-and-a-half trying to get the rights.”

Now Rudin and director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) are in pre-production on the first of three major films for Sony Pictures, which means one of the biggest literary phenomenons in history is only going to get bigger. Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (collectively known as the Millennium Trilogy), have sold 40 million copies worldwide. More than 7.2 million copies are in print in the U.S. alone, and the books have spent a combined 10 weeks topping the New York Times best-seller lists.

While Larsson’s survivors are entangled in a wicked estate dispute, his readers are buzzing about a more pressing question: Who should play computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and the crusading investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the Fincher movies?

“I think it’s hugely important that these parts be immaculately cast,” says Rudin. “Because to me, yeah, the stories are great, the plots are fantastic, the twists and turns are completely delicious, but the relationship of the two characters is it. That’s what it’s about.”

Speculation says Brad Pitt and Daniel Craig are being considered as candidates for Blomkvist, and actresses as wildly divergent as Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Carey Mulligan are being bantered about for Lisbeth.

According to Rudin, casting should wrap in a month or two, but nothing has been decided yet. “I’m happy that people are speculating, but it’s all fantasy,” he insisted. “I would be careful about believing what you’re reading. Let me remind you that Katharine Hepburn was at one point announced to be Scarlett O’Hara" in Gone with the Wind, he laughed. "That’s not to say that it won’t end up being one of them, but you can certainly say it isn’t any of them yet.”

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Book Review: From Container to Kitchen

2010-06-17T13:27:00.005-06:00

Here's a new mini-review from ForeWord Reviews of D. J. Herda's latest creation, From Container to Kitchen: Growing Fruits and Vegetables in Pots.

Cooking. FROM CONTAINER TO KITCHEN: GROWING FRUITS AND VEGETABLES IN POTS by D. J. Herda (New Society Publishers, 240 pages, softcover, $19.95, 978-0-86571-665-0): This book is designed for those residing in urban areas who wish to reap the benefits of organic, home gardening – without the convenience of a personal yard for cultivation. To help readers maximize growth and efficiency, Herda instructs regarding pot size and placement, soil type, light and water exposure, and harvesting. Those who wish to lead an organic lifestyle could expect to save seventy percent on fresh produce if they grow their own crops. Conversely, Herda also provides advice to those with a garden space in more rural locations who may also see merits to growing plants in containers.

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Ghostwriting Gaining in Popularity, Available Jobs

2010-06-07T09:53:00.003-06:00

A publishing industry veteran has launched a new trade association designed to help professional writers and authors interested in finding and landing more ghostwriting assignments.

The new Association of Ghostwriters (www.associationofghostwriters.org), founded by veteran ghostwriter and bestselling author Marcia Layton Turner (www.marcialaytonturner.com), taps into the rising demand for ghostwriting services across a wide spectrum of industries.

“Publishing experts estimate that as many as 50 percent of all New York Times bestsellers are ghostwritten today, but there’s also great demand for ghostwriters for other types of books and in businesses of all sizes,” says Turner, who also publishes the “Become a Six-Figure Writer” newsletter to help writers earn more money.

Turner says the demand for skilled ghostwriters is increasing because:

- Executives, coaches, consultants and national speakers want the credibility of a book to boost their business, but lack writing skills or time.
- More and more companies of all sizes are out-sourcing their social networking.
- Financial pressures in the traditional book publishing industry require that manuscripts arrive in near-publication-ready condition, something a content expert without writing experience can’t always deliver.
- Entrepreneurs discovering that sharing their knowledge online through blogs and articles helps showcase their expertise are seeking help from professional writers.
- The growth in self-publishing presents opportunities for subject experts to share their knowledge with a wider audience – if they can present it in a well-written book.

The Association of Ghostwriters helps members tap into this expanding market for their services. Member benefits include monthly teleseminars on topics related to marketing, project management, outsourcing, and time management; a monthly newsletter; a private members-only forum; ghostwriting job postings; and a member directory. The charter membership fee is $69 a year for a limited time.

For more information, visit www.associationofghostwriters.org. Or contact Marcia Layton Turner, executive director, Association of Ghostwriters, marcia (at) associationofghostwriters (dot) org, 585-586-8660.

As an alternative, check out AmSAW's "Writer for Hire" service for Professional Members at Writer for Hire, where, for $60 a year, members receive free promotion of their talents plus access to the daily TRULY Freelance Jobs Board, featuring only the best real freelance jobs (including ghostwriting gigs) currently available.

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Wall Street Journal's Take on Self-Publishing

2010-06-03T10:39:00.002-06:00

In a look at the growing digital self-publishing market, sure to be accelerated by Amazon's new 70 percent royalty for self-published e-books that meet certain conditions, WSJ offers its thoughts. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company "wants to be a partner, not a threat, to publishers. 'I think the real risk is that there are a multitude of publishers. Some of them are really forward leaning, and are really going after this new e-book area,' he says. 'If you are not one of those publishers, then I would be worried.'"

Seth Godin sees the overall market splintering into two tiers of offerings: "branded/high-quality" and "cheap/good enough." Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccahagrees, adding "there is some truth to the idea that low prices will drag down our prices."

Self-publishing advocates like to celebrate the small number of successes--Karen McQuestion says she has sold 36,000 ebooks (priced at under two dollars) through Amazon (she is now an Amazon Encore author). But at least this WSJ story also notes that "most self-published authors don't have popular followings and see modest sales," citing a more typical author who has sold fewer than 400 print books and 100 ebooks.

Some publishing people are rankled by the Journal's six or seven-step comparison of what's involved in traditional publishing versus self-publishing. Raccah places that number closer to 26 steps.
WSJ

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U. S. Author "Licensed To Thrill"

2010-05-31T13:53:00.007-06:00

Daniel Craig in the film Casino Royale

He might be the quintessential English spy, suave, laconic and comfortable in a dinner jacket, but the adventures of Ian Fleming's iconic creation James Bond are set to be continued by the chart-topping American thriller writer Jeffery Deaver. Best known for his quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, the star of books including The Bone Collector and The Stone Monkey, Deaver has been commissioned to write a new Bond novel by Fleming's estate.
Currently known as Project X, the book will be set in the present day, unlike Sebastian Faulks's recent addition to the Bond oeuvre, Devil May Care, which took place in 1967.

Apart from its contemporary setting, Deaver was giving little else away about the plot, but revealed it would occur over a short period of time and take 007 to "three or four exotic locations around the globe". He has already started writing the book, which is out next May, and promised it would retain "the persona of James Bond as Fleming created him and the unique tone the author brought to his books", while also incorporating his own "literary trademarks: detailed research, fast pacing and surprise twists".

Fleming's estate was moved to approach Deaver after he raved about the Bond books in an acceptance speech for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award. "I'd always enjoyed Jeffery Deaver's thrillers [but] I didn't know anything about the author himself and expected a fairly low-key response from him when he received our award," said Corinne Turner, the managing director of Ian Fleming Publications.

"I was surprised and delighted when he spoke very fondly of Ian and about the influence that the Bond books had had on his own writing career. It was at that point that I first thought James Bond could have an interesting adventure in Jeffery Deaver's hands."

Fleming's 14 James Bond novels have sold more than 100m copies around the world, and Faulks's Devil May Care, published in 2008 to mark the centenary of Fleming's birth, was Penguin's fastest selling hardback fiction title ever.

The publisher of Deaver's contribution, Hodder & Stoughton, has equally lofty expectations for Project X. "We've very high hopes," said Hodder & Stoughton's publishing director of fiction, Carolyn Mays, adding that the American Deaver is actually well placed to take on a British icon. "If Bond fans know Jeffery and his work they won't have any qualms about it at all. He is American but he knows Fleming and Bond back to front, and he's also got a very European sensibility. I'm sure he will do a brilliant job and do Bond justice."

Previous official Bond novels have been written by authors including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Raymond Benson. - Guardian

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Your Poll Results from AmSAW

2010-05-29T14:16:00.011-06:00

The American Society of Authors and Writers is pleased (confused, dazed, stunned) to present the results of our latest poll: "In what genres do you write exclusive of all others?"

As of today, the results are

1. Women's, Romance, or Chick Lit 22.7% (41 votes)
2. All Genres 15.5% (28 votes)
3. Literary 11.6% (21 votes)
4. Sci-Fi/Fantasy 11% (20 votes)
5. How-To/Self-Help 9.4% (17 votes)
6. Mainstream/Contemporary 6.6% (12 votes)
7. Juvenile/Young Adult 5.5% (10 votes)
8. Biography/Memoir 5% (9 votes)
9. Other: 12.7% (23 votes)Total Votes: 181

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Former CIA Op Spins Cold-War Tale

2010-05-24T17:09:00.020-06:00

Embassy Intrigue

by Roger E. Neetz

A veteran of World War II, serving with the 8th Air Force, author Roger Neetz is a graduate of Georgetown University and the School of Foreign Service. His professional career spans the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service and the Central Intelligence Agency, serving tours in Germany and the former Soviet Union. He is author of more than fifty professional papers on policy, trade, and economics, as well as three historical fiction novels and several short stories. He is currently retired and lives in Vero Beach, FL

About the Book
Embassy Intrigue is a defining tale of intelligence operations that leaves no stone unturned. Fact and fiction are skillfully interwoven into a suspenseful plot of mystery, intrigue, and betrayal in this elegantly crafted novel This book is the inside story of Embassy life and intelligence operations in Moscow during the period known as the Cold War, where events that transpired then still impact on today's world. The clandestine nature of the operation and the deceit of Embassy personnel by power brokers give the story a real life flavor, guiding the reader through the KGB microwave penetrations that made the Embassy in Moscow a health hazard and explores the Israeli MOSSAD cooperation with the CIA, which agreed to provide material support for the development of an atomic bomb.

See Embassy Intrigue at

Amazon.com

Barnes and Noble

Embassy Intrigue (American Book Publishing, Spring 2010, $22.00. Fiction. Historical. Contemporary. Political Intrigue.,

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Publishing Bits & Pieces

2010-05-20T09:24:00.003-06:00

Harlequin has announced that its imprint, Harlequin Teen, will first give away and then sell for $2.99 Julie Kagawa's 15,000-word novella, Winter's Passage, which links her February debut novel, The Iron King, and her forthcoming July release, The Iron Daughter. Harlequin's Malle Vallik says "the purpose is to keep her audience interested while building their excitement for the next book."

A Sesame Street eBookstore has gone live today, offering subscription access to a library of over 100 children's books for $39.99 a year. Sesame Workshop SYP of worldwide media distribution Scott Chambers calls it "an important step forward in bringing our 40-year library of children's books to the next generation of young readers." He added, "We want to deliver our content to young readers in the formats they are engaging with on a daily basis." The initiative is managed for them by Impelsys.

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Does Everyone Have a POD Dog in This Fight???

2010-05-19T11:56:00.005-06:00

News out of New York today has it that Barnes & Noble, the world's largest bookseller, is entering the Print-On-Demand fray by "extending its deep and longstanding tradition of supporting authors and publishers with PubIt! by Barnes & Noble, an easy and lucrative way for independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through Barnes & Noble.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. The easy-to-use publishing and distribution platform offers qualified independent publishers and authors of self-published works expanded distribution, visibility and protection that only Barnes & Noble can offer."

According to the Press Release, this latest move propels Barnes & Noble toward one of the world's largest digital catalogs, spanning eBooks, journals, periodicals, and other types of reading material. The bookstore giant will distribute its PubIt! titles through BN.COM and Barnes & Noble's eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of "dedicated customers in-store and online," according to the company.

Although details of the new POD program won't be available for several weeks, B & N promises to protect intellectual property with Barnes & Noble's "best-in-class digital rights management technology" while offering authors and publishers access to millions of Barnes & Noble customers on hundreds of the most popular computing, mobile and eBook reading devices.

"As a company that has achieved much of its success by building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and authors," according to Theresa Horner, director, Digital Products, "Barnes & Noble's new PubIt! service represents an exciting evolution and significant opportunity in the digital content arena. Barnes & Noble is uniquely positioned to support writers and publishers and bring their exciting digital works to the broadest audience of readers anywhere."

Whether online or on-the-go, Barnes & Noble customers will have access to PubIt! titles with the opportunity to browse, sample, buy, and download the digital content in seconds to their devices with free BN reader software, Horner added. Using Barnes & Noble's breakthrough Read In Store(TM) technology, NOOK(TM) customers can also browse the complete contents of PubIt! titles while in Barnes & Noble stores.

The company claims that PubIt! is a convenient one-stop-shop, allowing publishers to get their content in front of consumers for purchase and reading on the most widely adopted mobile devices and software platforms. "By following simple steps to upload their content in an industry standard format for electronic titles, content creators can reach consumers on hundreds of devices including: NOOK by Barnes & Noble, PC, Mac(R), iPad(TM), iPhone(R), BlackBerry(R) and others. For more information on free BN eReader software and apps, please visit www.bn.com/ebooks/download-reader.asp."

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Give Editors What They Want

2010-05-17T23:08:00.001-06:00

It's a hard lesson for writers to learn, apparently. Editors don't want to see what you want to write. Editors want to see what they want to publish. There's a difference.

For example, I've been pitching a book about Papa Hemingway's time in Cuba for the past half dozen years or more. Every year, my agent resurrects it and tries to get some publisher to pick it up. Every year, she has no luck. Not because it's not a good book, and not because it's not publishable. Not only would it make a great read, it would sell like hotcakes. Still, no luck.

Then, on a lark, I asked her to pitch a new book idea about three early feminist writers, and the editors went crazy vying to be first to pick it up. ("Let me know IMMEDIATELY if anyone else shows interest in this project before I get back to you.")

What's the difference? I'm guessing that, since Hemingway died a long time ago and the marketplace has been flooded with stories about Papa ever since, prospects for picking up another book on the same subject and publishing it successfully may seem remote. But a book about three pioneering women who just also happened to be writer/feminists? Are you kidding? How en vogue. How politically correct. How hip!

I guess the lesson I learned from all of this is simple: Hit 'em where they ain't. Or, more appropriately, pitch the ones they want.

Sure, you can keep plugging away at your own pet projects. Every writer has them; there's nothing wrong with that. But, in the meantime, you should consider thinking long and hard about generating some more commercially viable properties, what makes for a successful publishable book, and what editors are likely to think people are likely to buy.

That's one of the ways AmSAW contributes to your success. Every story we run, every photo we publish is a nudge in a new direction. Read what SCRIBE! Media Magazine Professional has to offer with an unbiased eye toward who's making the news and today's hottest trends. If it's happening today (or will be happening tomorrow), some publisher somewhere is going to be interested in a book on the subject. See what I mean?

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L. A. Times, IACP Book Awards

2010-04-26T11:22:00.004-06:00

Here are the recently announced LAT award-winning books, along with the International Association of Culinary Professional (IACP) Cookbook Awards in the two prestigious annual events.

2009 LAT AWARDS
Biography
Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton)

Current Interest
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (McSweeney's Books)

Fiction
Rafael Yglesias, A Happy Marriage (Scribner)

Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Philipp Meyer, American Rust (Spiegel & Grau)

Graphic Novel
David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon)

History
Kevin Starr, Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance 1950 - 1963 (Oxford University Press)

Mystery / Thriller
Stuart Neville, The Ghosts of Belfast (Soho Press)

Poetry
Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press)

Science & Technology
Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (Basic Books)

Young Adult
Elizabeth Partridge, Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary (Viking Children's)
- More

IACP AWARDS
IACP 2010 Cookbook Award Winners

General
“Stephanie Alexander’s Kitchen Garden Companion”
Author: Stephanie Alexander
Editor: Kathleen Gandy
Publisher: Penguin Group (Australia)

American
“My New Orleans: The Cookbook”
Author: John Besh
Editor: Dorothy Kalins and Jean Lucas
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

Baking: Savory or Sweet
“Rose’s Heavenly Cakes”
Author: Rose Levy Beranbaum
Editor: Pamela Chirls
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Single Subject
“Go Fish”
Author: Al Brown
Publisher: Random House (New Zealand)

Compilations
“Gourmet Today”
Author: Ruth Reichl
Editor: Rux Martin
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

Children, Youth and Family
“Williams-Sonoma Family Meals”
Author: Maria Helm Sinskey
Editor: Kim Laidlaw
Publisher: Oxmoor House

Health and Special Diet
“The Cancer-Fighting Kitchen: Nourishing, Big-Flavor Recipes for Cancer Treatment and Recovery”
Authors: Rebecca Katz and Mat Edelson
Editor: Melissa Moore
Publisher: Celestial Arts, an imprint of Ten Speed Press
- More

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Recession? What Recession?

2010-04-23T19:59:00.001-06:00

Online retailer Amazon reported a 68% rise in net profits for the first quarter of the year to $299m (£194.5m). Turnover was up by 9% to $2.2bn, while total sales jumped by 46% to $7.13bn - more than expected by analysts.

However its forecast for the April-June period were lower than what investors had hoped, and shares in the firm fell 6% in after-hours trading. Its Kindle electronic reader has helped sales but it faces a market share battle against Apple's new iPad.

Amazon will start selling the Kindle at some Target stores later this month. It can only currently be bought on the Amazon website.

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Oh, the (One Million) Books They Published!

2010-04-18T19:57:00.004-06:00

Bowker, the company that keeps statistics on such things, compiled information from its Books-in-Print database and recently announced that conventional publishing produced 288,355 titles in 2009 - and print-on-demand services produced 764,448 titles. That's more than a million titles published last year. Was your book among them?

Conventional (non-POD or subsidy) publishers published 45,000 novels, 32,300 children's books, 19,300 religion titles, 15,400 science titles, and 26,000 economics titles.

Three companies--BiblioBazaar, Books LLC, and Kessinger Publishing--published nearly 700,000 titles (mostly reprints of copyright-free books).

The top POD publishers were CreateSpace (21,819 titles), Lulu.com (10,386 titles), Xlibris (10,161), AuthorHouse (9,445 titles), and PublishAmerica (5,689 titles). Since many of these companies are not exclusive publishers, it's possible at least some of these titles were duplicates.

The question you're left to face, then, is this: Why didn't you publish a book last year?

The answer: You're too smart (i.e., informed, educated, frightened, experienced) to publish with a user/loser such as PublishAmerica. And you simply weren't in the right place at the right time to pitch your work to a conventional publisher.

Right place? Right time? Let's take a look at what literary agent Faye Swetky has to say about that.

"Getting a book published by a conventional publisher involves several things. One is subject matter. It has to be marketable. Two is timing. The market must be anticipated for the time in which your book comes out. Three is compatibility. You have to hit the right editor at the right time in order to get that editor to commit. Three months earlier, three months later, it could be a totally different story. But right on the button? SALE!"

Is it fair? Are you kidding! Is it just? Right. So why are you still in the business of writing?

You know the answer to that better than I do.

After all, I'm just a writer.

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Freelancer, Charge Thyself

2010-04-13T19:01:00.009-06:00

I received a letter from a writer who is apparently new at the business of freelance writing for a living. She wanted to know what she should charge to write reports for a private investigator who inquired about her services. My response:

Reports writing is such a varied field--the reports could include audio transcription, summarizing court transcripts, condensing meeting minutes, highlighting police reports, etc.--that it's pretty tough to set a per-project price on it. For something such as this, I would decide what my time is worth per hour and go with that.

As an alternative, you could offer a hybrid approach, quoting a price per hour in a range of, say, $40 - $75, depending upon the amount of research involved or the difficulty you anticipate of preparing the report. If you estimate a project to be easy sailing, you could quote toward the lower range of $40/hour. If you anticipate a project to be really time-consuming and unpleasant, you could quote a higher price closer to $75/hour or more. In that way, both writer and client would know what the bottom line is likely to be from the start and would both feel fairly comfortable with the final figure.

You could also charge a flat per-project rate plus overages based upon anticipated hours. In condensing a transcript of a three-hour court hearing, for example, you could charge a flat rate of $150 ($50 for three hours' work) plus $50 an hour for anything over three hours' time. That would be a nice way of protecting both writer and client, as well. Some typical flat-rate projects:

Advertising Copywriting: At $50 - $100/hour; $250 and up per day; $500 and up per week; $1,000-$2,000 as a monthly retainer.

Direct-mail Advertising: This would include copywriting direct-mail letters, response cards, and other advertising and marketing materials. At $50 - $120/hour or $2,500 to $10,000/project, depending on the complexity of the project. Additional charges for production such as desktop publishing, addressing, photography, graphics production, etc., would be in order.

Press Releases: At $350-$500/release.

Marketing and Sales Letters: At $400-$2,000/project.

As you can see, flat rates vary considerably per project.

Remember that, no matter how you charge, you'll want to include out-of-pocket reimbursement for expenditures: postage, shipping, telephone calls, travel, etc. And don't forget some kind of cancellation clause, whereby you specify that, should the client cancel before the completion of a project, you will bill and be paid immediately for all work expended by you up to that point. (You'll need to keep accurate time records on an Excel spreadsheet or a timesheet recorder of some sort.)

To learn more about freelance writing rates and what the American Society of Authors and Writers advises freelancers charge, check out AmSAW at http://amsaw.org.

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Harper Studio Bites the Dust

2010-04-05T11:31:00.002-06:00

Announced at the end of the day on Good Friday (somebody has a warped sense of humor), following the departure of founding executive Bob Miller, Harper's Michael Morrison confirmed "We have decided that in the interest of what's best for our Harper Studio authors and employees, our last batch of titles to be published under the Harper Studio imprint will be on the Summer 2010 list." All titles scheduled for beyond that season will be absorbed by one of Harper's other imprints, according to Morrison, who said Harper "will be contacting agents and authors to discuss the best editors and imprints for each of these titles."

He also indicated that "all our imprints are happy to discuss profit sharing scenarios on a book-by-book basis. Debbie Stier will remain director of digital marketing for Harper, reporting to Carolyn Pittis, and will acquire books as an editor-at-large. Julia Cheiffetz will move to the Harper imprint and report to Jonathan Burnham. Assistant editor Katie Salisbury will continue to report to Julia, and Jessica Wiener will continue as director of marketing.

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Otto Penzler Collection To Auction Block

2010-03-24T10:18:00.008-06:00

On Thursday, April 8, Swann Galleries will offer The Otto Penzler Collection of British Espionage and Thriller fiction. The sale represents a select portion of the private library of the well-known mystery fiction specialist and bookseller who amassed his collection over 40 years. Penzler befriended many noted authors, including Eric Ambler, Ken Follett, John Gardner, and others, who inscribed copies of their works.

“British spy novels are among the greatest of all works in the mystery genre,” Penzler said in the introduction to the auction catalogue. “This is the first auction ever devoted entirely to this important literary genre.”

Among the best known of the British espionage works are Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, the source material for the iconic films spanning the last several decades. The auction offers more than 25 such books, the most notable being a first edition of the first Bond book, Casino Royale, in near perfect condition, 1953 ($20,000 to $30,000); a fine copy of Moonraker, inscribed and signed by the author to Fleming collector Eileen M. Cond, 1955 ($15,000 to $25,000); and a signed limited edition of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the first novel published after the debut of the film series and an immediate bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, 1963 ($6,000 to $9,000).

Other Fleming highlights include first editions of Live and Let Die, 1954 ($2,000 to $3,000); Diamonds are Forever, 1956 ($2,500 to $3,500); From Russia with Love, 1957 ($3,000 to $4,000); and two first editions in different bindings of Dr. No, 1958 ($3,000 to $4,000 for the pair).

There is also a fascinating archive of correspondence between Fleming, illustrator Richard Chopping—who created many of the best known dust jacket images for the series—and others, containing details about jacket art, payment information and more, 62 letters in total, 1950s-60s ($12,000 to $18,000).

The sale offers many James Bond novels written in the 1980s and 90s by John Gardner, including an original typescript for License Renewed, with editorial corrections in Gardner’s hand throughout, 1980 ($1,200 to $1,800); and signed copies of his first four Bond titles, inscribed to the Penzlers ($1,200 to $1,800 for the set).

A run of works by Eric Ambler includes a rare first edition in the scarce dust jacket of Cause for Alarm, 1938, signed and inscribed to Penzler ($5,000 to $7,000); a first edition of Journey into Fear, 1940, which was made into the popular film noir starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton ($2,000 to $3,000); and signed first American editions of both books.

Among notable first editions of Graham Greene's works are a copy of Stamboul Train, 1932 ($2,000 to $3,000); and a wartime printing of The Ministry of Fear, written during his Foreign Service appointment in West Africa, 1943 ($1,000 to $1,500).

Also featured are several works by Dennis Wheatle and a selection of titles by John Le Carré, including a beautiful first edition of his first work, Call for the Dead, which introduced the character John Smiley, British Secret Service Agent, 1961, and a bright first English edition of his second book, A Murder of Quality, 1962 ($8,000 to $12,000 each); plus several signed editions.

Among books signed and inscribed to Penzler are a first edition of Len Deighton’s first book, The Ipcress File, 1962 ($1,500 to $2,000); plus books by Desmond Bagley, Frederick Forsyth, and Ken Follett.

Rounding out the sale are works by early masters of the genre, William Le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim, early 20th century authors who pioneered the spy novel and inspired Fleming, Greene and many others; plus books by Geoffrey Household, Francis Beeding, Manning Coles, Brian Freemantle, Andrew Garve, H.C. McNeile (known as Sapper), Baroness Orczy, Anthony Price, and more.

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New No-Yard Gardening Book Gets Big Librarian Boost

2010-03-16T18:12:00.011-06:00

Here's a look at what the influential Consortium Librarian Express had to say about one of its select April 2010 new-book pitches:

Featured Titles

From Container to Kitchen by D. J. Herda

More and more people are recognizing the need for nutritious, local, sustainable food, but organic options can be costly and the produce in most supermarkets is anything but local. In From Container to Kitchen, D.J. Herda shows that there is a way for urban dwellers to enjoy the benefits of traditional gardening and, for those even without yards, to maximize the harvest of fresh, healthy edibles. Herda is an award-winning freelance author, editor, and photojournalist who has written several thousand articles and more than eighty books. He is an avid organic gardener and test grower.

From Container to Kitchen | D.J. Herda | New Society Publishers | Gardening | 9780865716650 | April 2010 | $19.95 | Trade Paper

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Vampire Novels Biting the Dust?

2010-03-08T13:54:00.009-07:00

With the enormous success of the Twilight series of vampire books and their spin-offs into a thousand similar titles, one has to ask the obvious: is it curtains for Vlad and all his impalers? It just may be. And the newest literary genre to take Publisher's Row by storm may indicate just that.

But before I make that jump to conclusion, listen to what one major publisher's representative had to say to me recently.

"Vampire books are a dime a dozen. We're no longer looking for novels true to the genre. We're looking for something different. If it doesn't stand out from the pack, we're not interested."

Enter the mash-up.

What, you ask, is a mash-up? If you have to ask, it's safe to assume you haven't yet gotten your hands on a copy of the surprisingly successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a work centered around a classic historical figure meeting vampires, zombies, and other things that go bump in the night.

It has been a year since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was unleashed upon the unsuspecting masses. Instead of running for their lives, readers ran to their favorite bookstores--in droves--in order to see what the combining of two literary figures, Jane Austen and the much more contemporary Seth Grahame-Smith, would lead to.

What it led to, of course, is the first literary mash-up from Quirk Books. The result has been a steady flow of unearthly creatures set against the backdrop of the literary classics. It's a curious combination, as Carol Memmott of USA Today put it, of "classic literary icons doing battle with B-movie demons.

"In Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre (Gallery Books), hitting stores April 13, Charlotte Brontë's plain Jane Eyre is an indomitable zombie killer."

There have been (or soon will be) other quirky titles, as well, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim (Coscom Entertainment) and Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter (Eos). All of which leads one to ask, Et tu, Vlade?

And if the latest literary genre trend (remember "chick lit"?) is destined for a quick if showy demise, the question remains. What's going to step forward to take its place?

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Beating Writer's Block

2010-02-27T09:50:00.003-07:00

A writer recently wrote in asking for help:

"I know this may sound silly but how do you suggest handling writer's block? I have been having a real doozy case of writer's block that is (pardon my language) a real pain in the ass and need some suggestions as to how to get through this thing. Believe me, if you want a frustrated writer, then I'm your girl :)."

Writer's block? Is that what's bothering you, bunky??

It's a common malady, of course--common enough to have its own moniker. Here are a few proven suggestions on how to beat it.

1. Have more than one writing project going at any given time. I have 20 books, a few columns, and several articles underway constantly. If I don't feel like working on what I should be working on, I work on something else instead until the writing juices begin to flow, after which I can get back to the project I need to complete.

2. If you're working on a book-length property, try sitting down and reading what you wrote the last time you were at the computer. Read it out loud to give you a better chance of "hearing" how it sounds. You'll likely catch a few typos, change a few phrases, substitute a couple of words here and there, perhaps even add or subtract some sections in the piece. By the time you're finished with that, you'll be all warmed up and ready to tackle the next section in the book.

3. If you're working on a shorter piece, such as an article or a column, and you just can't get into it, try writing something else. Something ridiculous. Something offbeat (for you, at least). Write a limerick or a poem. Write an ad to sell your bongo drums on Craig's List. You get my point. By the time you're done fooling around, you'll be geared up to tackle what you really need to be working on.

4. Write something under a subjectively imposed deadline. Make it a letter to your fifth-grade teacher or a note to your mom. Give yourself 15 minutes, the way your editor would give you if you were working on a breaking story for the local newspapeer or a TV or radio news department. Do you think you'd have writer's block then? There's something very liberating about someone telling you, "I want it in 20 minutes or else!"

5. Try turning on several distracting contraptions, such as a television, MP3 player, and radio. Contrary to what you might expect, that often forces you to "block out" the distractions and focus solely on your writing.

Writer's block doesn't have to control your life. You have to control it. I've used all of the above tricks from time to time, and they have all worked for me. Believe it or not, I don't have writer's block anymore. Nada. Never. And I haven't had it for more than 30 years. I have become so used to writing all types of different-length genres under deadline that nothing interferes with my work anymore.

And that's an awfully nice feeling, especially when you earn your living from writing.

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New Book Excerpt: Ten Rules of Writing

2010-02-24T16:39:00.004-07:00

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is scheduled to be published in March 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It's worth a sneak peak:

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.

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Build Your Writer's Platform for Success

2010-02-14T10:08:00.002-07:00

I recently heard from my agent about how she wished she could get across the notion that a publisher's interest in a book is often only as good as the writer's platform. "I have explained it on our agency site, but I'm still not getting through. I have writers confusing their platform with their bio. Can you help get the message out?"

Well, I can try.

Think of a platform in terms of the number of people you can reach when you need to. I'm not talking about strangers but, rather, about those who know you, trust you, and want to help support you and your work.

That's an important concept to most acquisitions editors (those who actually specialize in acquiring new book properties) because the size of an author's platform directly relates to sales.

Sure, sure, I know. It's a publisher's job to market your book and generate sales. But publishers learned long ago that, if a writer could directly influence the sales of, say, 1,000 books, those sales are pure gravy--they're sales the publisher reaps in addition to its conventional marketing efforts. If a writer can influence the sales of 5,000 books, that's five times better.

Get the point?

So how do you build your writer's platform? Get your name out. Influence people. Contribute knowledgeable articles and comments to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, on-line magazines, etc. If you belong to an organization willing to promote your book, say so in your platform and list the number of members within that organization. VFW? The Rotary Club? Your college alumni association? All add to the strength of your platform.

In short, wherever you can come up with a thousand or twenty thousand followers, you're adding to the strength of your platform.

Once you have developed an impressive looking platform, get in the habit of including that information with all of your book proposals (and even article pitches, for that matter). You'll be increasing the chances of landing a lucrative book-publishing contract a thousand-fold.

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Kirkus Reviews Dodges Ax

2010-02-13T17:59:00.003-07:00

Good news for authors everywhere. The venerable Kirkus Reviews, the American book-review journal founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980), which was expected to close a few weeks ago, has received a new lease on life. According to a report in Daily Finance, the business has been sold to shopping-mall mogul and bookstore owner, Herb Simon. Simon is better known as the owner of the Indiana Pacers NBA franchise.

This marriage may seem unusual, but regardless, it's welcomed relief. Kirkus will keep its editors and maintain its bi-weekly publishing schedule. It plans to "beef up" its digital offerings--where there should be plenty of opportunities.

Kirkus Reviews is published on the first and fifteenth of each month. Reviews appear two to four months prior to a book's publication; the periodical features approximately 4,500 titles per year, which include fiction, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, translations, nonfiction, and children's and young-adult (YA) books. Kirkus is the definitive pre-publication review source for the literary and film industries.

Elaine Szewczyk is the editor, handling fiction; Eric Liebetrau is the managing editor and nonfiction editor; Vicky Smith is the children's and YA editor; and Molly Brown is the senior editor in charge of Kirkus Supplements. Sales director Beth Werner handles all sales, advertising, and marketing efforts.

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Keep Cranking Out Those Proposals

2010-02-12T09:05:00.005-07:00

I know it's tempting. You've pitched your novel, you've pitched your how-to book, you've pitched your article, you've pitched your brains out. All to no avail. So why go on pitching?

Here's one reason: because you're a writer.

Here's another: because editors are editors. And that's not always a good thing.

My agent pitched an editor with a financial book proposal I worked up more than a year ago. Nada. Nothing. No word. No interest? No, not so.

The editor whom she pitched e-mailed her the other day and asked if the property was still available because, if so, she wanted to take a closer look at it. Which is, of course, the very first step toward landing a contract.

Was I pleased? Are you kidding??? Was I upset that it had taken the editor so long to get around to requesting a look at the manuscript? Are you kidding???

But, while slow responses to seemingly timely proposals (a year ago, you'll remember, is just about when the financial crap hit the economic fan) are frustrating, they are nonetheless part of the editorial process. For every twelve book ideas we pitch, eleven will come back positive or negative within a couple of weeks. One will come back six months or more later. Don't ask me why.

The bottom line: Keep on plugging. Sooner or later, someone is going to find something you're pitching of enough value to offer you a contract on it. That's the good news. The bad? You'll never know when it's going to happen...until it happens.

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Tight Economy Creates New Freelance Opportunities

2010-02-07T10:54:00.009-07:00

When the going gets tough, the tough get outa town. That's what I always say. And that's what a lot of Americans have been doing in this tight economic crunch we've seen for the past year, with little hope of change. They've literally been getting outa town--not buying, not investing, not saving for the future, not spending as they did once.

That's the bad news. The good news is that with every economic downturn come new challenges and opportunities--especially so for financial writers. People can benefit now more than ever from sound financial advice, and most people readily admit that they need it.

In fact, according to one source (the Harris Interactive 2009 Financial Literacy Survey), 41 percent of U.S. adults gave themselves a grade of C, D, or F on their knowledge of personal finances and economics. Another 80 percent believe that, even though they know something about the subject, the could benefit from some expert advice.

What's that, you say? You're not a financial expert? Perhaps not, but you are a writer. As such, you have the ability to interview and interpret and pitch your economic features to magazines, newspapers, and book publishers everywhere. Are you beginning to see a common thread emerging here?

Don't expect to land hefty assignments from the Big Four. Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, and Money magazines rely heavily on material produced in-house for their copy. That leaves few opportunities for freelancers to break in.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of other markets around just begging for articles offering solid financial advice for their readers, particularly general-interest trade publications such as Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and others.

The same holds true for local newspapers. Brian Johnson, managing editor of Arizona's Ahwatukee Foothills News, admits he has seen a marked increase in demand among readers for more finance-related articles in the past twelve months. While the Wall Street Journal and major magazines tackle the technical side of the financial markets and investing, Johnson's small community paper tries to educate average Americans on the basics of sound financial practices.

"I'm not looking for the sophisticated article about building a multi-million dollar stock portfolio," he said. "I'm just looking for the stuff that can help real people in our community--families with kids--learn about budgeting, credit cards and other financial 101 information."

And that, it seems to me, is exactly the market freelance writers are best able to fill.

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New Imprints Mean New Author Markets

2010-01-25T10:01:00.002-07:00

Two new imprints are good news for authors, offering them, at least potentially, new markets to which to peddle their books.

The first is Grand Central's newly christened Grand Central Life & Style imprint, starting in fall 2010. They will publish between eight and twelve titles a year across categories including style (beauty and fashion), food (cooking), body & mind (diet, fitness, self-help, and inspiration), home (organization, design, and green living), and personal connections (relationships, parenting, and pets). Karen Murgolo will oversee the new line as its editorial director.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Pan Macmillan publishing director Maria Rejt will run her own imprint, Mantle, which launches in May with Scott Turow's new book. Publishing up to 20 books a year, the line will pull together many of Rejt's existing authors from Pan, Picador, and Macmillan. Managing director Anthony Forbes Watson says, "She has a rare eye for high quality writing with broad appeal, and an unstinting focus on her authors. Mantle is the perfect vehicle for her talents."

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Our Advice to Authors: Drop Dead

2010-01-14T10:22:00.003-07:00

With the year 2009 solidly wrapped in history, news of last year's book sales is, umm, frightening. According to a study of all book sales tracked last year, books about vampires, ghouls, zombies and other "undeads" garnered at least 17 percent of all books sold. Stephenie Meyer led the pack with her Twilight series, but that wasn't the only story behind last year's best sellers.

There were other, less frightening, winners, including a couple of fems known as Julie and Julia, a Harvard symbologist who cracked The Da Vinci Code, and a nerdy bespectacled kid and his diary all flexed their muscles in 2009.

Still, when nearly a fifth of all books sold revolve around things that go bump in the night, writers have to take notice. A true trend (albeit one that could come to a crashing end tomorrow), the undead sales were up from 14 percent of all books tracked in 2008, which was up from a paltry 2 percent in 2007. Are you starting to see a pattern developing here?

Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels that serve as inspiration for HBO's True Blood, had nine titles in the top hundred sellers of the year, and P.C. and Kristin Cast, the mother/daughter team who write the House of Night series, had six.

Not only that, but experts expect the trend to continue this year, again based upon Meyer's continuing popularity. Whether or not she introduces a new book in 2010, the film version of Eclipse, based upon the third book in the Twilight series, comes to life in theaters in June, while the paperback reissue of her 2008 adult hardcover The Host will hit the stands on April 13.

And the ghouls just keep on coming.

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Do Publishers Require a Completed Manuscript?

2010-01-02T09:39:00.008-07:00

We received a question the other day about selling full-length fiction to publishers.

I heard somewhere that fiction usually needs to be finished to sell to a publisher and non-fic can be the first three chapters and outline, but I'm not sure how accurate that really is. - M. B., Florida

Well, M. B., I'm glad you brought that up, because it's not true. At least it's not always true. I'm sure that the vast majority of novels are sold complete, simply because most of them come from newbies to the novel-publishing world, and that's how they write--from start to finish. Only then do they begin shopping their masterpieces around for publication. You know, the First-Step, Second-Step, Third-Step approach to writing.

The truth, however, is that many novels, particularly from well-tested and reliable writers, sell on the basis of a couple of completed chapters and a strong, detailed outline. In fact, I sold my very first novel on the basis of an outline only. It was 23 pages long and pretty complete, but the editor never did ask to see a sample from the book.

Which was good news for me, since I hadn't started writing it yet.

The fact is that professional writers--freelancers who earn their living from writing--couldn't possibly take the time to complete a book before selling it, running the risk that it might never sell. Full-time writers need to roll over their words continually into income. When a writer typically spends a year working on a novel, that means he's spent a year without generating any appreciable income unless he's working under contract and receiving author's advances.

Of course, an editor has to have faith in a writer's being able and willing to finish the book properly to offer a contract on the basis of an outline and a few sample chapters. Sometimes untested novelists do best selling their first properties as completed manuscripts. But it all boils down to the individual editor and the policies of the publishing house.

But for a professional writer working in these tough economic times particularly, that dog won't hunt, and most editors know it!

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Alexa Ranks AmSAW Tops

2009-12-27T22:26:00.001-07:00

The first time I visited this site, which says it's a professional media organization designed to bring writers together with editors, publishers, producers, and all those other people whom writers absolutely need to get published or produced, I was blown away. The graphics and layout are unique and actually hauntingly beautiful. All the links seem to work. General navigation around the site is different from most sites that use a conventional nav bar, but it's actually easier to find your way around after you explore the home page for a minute or two. Best of all is the free information and resources--updated regularly--to help writers and media professionals do their work. The paid portion of the site seems to offer a ton more stuff, and I like the idea that there's a free look at a sample newsletter, so you know what you're buying before you join.

So far, I've just been enjoying the freebies, but I might spring for the annual fee and become a member. I have a feeling this is just the site for professionals run by professionals that amateurs like me need to take that next step forward and start publishing more often.

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Story Collections Poised for Comeback?

2009-12-21T09:58:00.001-07:00

Our friends at Publisher's Marketplace, who like to track such things, have an update on the growing popularity of short-story anthologies. Though such collections traditionally sell poorly, 2009 enjoyed a variety of critically acclaimed anthology releases.

For starters, Entertainment Weekly recently picked Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders as their top work of fiction for the year. And New York Magazine's list of top-ten picks (below) puts Lydia Davis's collection on top.

On PM's own compilation list, pulling together over twenty of the best of the Best of 2009 lists, four of the top 10 fiction titles are story collections. Drawing on the additional lists published since PM's tabulation, Daniyal Mueenuddin moved into a tie for third place; Lydia Davis's The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, took sole possession of fourth place; Alice Munro's Too Much Happiness, remained in the top 10, and Wells Tower's story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, also joined the list.

Among the runners-up receiving at least some "best of the year" votes are Maile Meloy's collection, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.

Then there was Oprah Winfrey's first book club selection in almost a year--yes, stories, by Uwem Akpan. In May, short-story master Alice Munro won the third Man International Booker prize. And at the November National Book Award ceremonies, for the 60th anniversary "best of the NBA" fiction, four of the six nominees were story collections, with The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor taking the prize.

Here is the New York Magazine list:

1. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, by Lydia Davis (FSG)
2. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, by Eric W. Sanderson (Abrams)
3. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James (Riverhead)
4. Lowboy, John Wray (FSG)
5. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist, by Thomas Levenson (Houghton Mifflin)
6. This Is How, by M.J. Hyland (Black Cat)
7. Imperial, by William T. Vollmann (Viking)
8. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower (FSG)
9. The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, by Bill Simmons (Ballantine / ESPN)
10. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Penguin)

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AmSAW Interviews Author Janet Kay

2009-12-09T18:41:00.006-07:00

Author Janet Kay had something to say. And she said it. Choosing to go the alternative-to-conventional-publishing route, she is, by and large, pleased with the results. And she said it.

AmSAW caught up with her near a sprawling lake in the sprawling mountains of scenic sunny (in summer) Montana, where she spends her winters.

Don't ask us why.

Q: Although you have been writing for much of your life, Waters of the Dancing Sky is your first published novel. How did you feel when you received your first bound copy from the publisher?

It was like a dream come true - one of my lifelong ambitions finally fulfilled. After basking in the glow of this accomplishment for a few minutes, the reality set in. So... now that I'm a published author, now what? What's next?

Q: In what ways did the entire publishing experience surprise you?

I was surprised at the complexity of the process - all the steps involved in creating and marketing a quality product. However, I was fortunate to have a publisher who guided me through the process, involving me in every step along the way. I was able to maintain control, something that was important to me.

Q: A lot of first-time authors in particular don’t realize how much successful marketing depends upon the little things they can do to help the publisher sell books. What are some of the self-marketing tips you’ve learned over the past several months?

I've learned that in today's changing world of publishing, ALL authors are expected to play a significant role in marketing their books. Some of the self-marketing tips that have worked for me include establishing a web site for my book (check it out at Waters of the Dancing Sky), setting up a contest in which my readers can win prizes, using the Internet including Facebook and other sites to promote my book, mailing out promotional postcards and press kits, doing interviews for the news media, hiring a consultant to create a video book trailer promoting my novel, etc.

I've learned that book signings and book fairs aren't nearly as effective if I don't also do a book reading. And I've learned how important it is to solicit and utilize book reviews in my marketing efforts.

One of the keys to success, I believe, is networking - working with and learning from the pros, people who have connections that most authors do not have when they begin their careers. There is a wealth of resources out there to help you promote your work. One great example is the American Society of Authors and Writers promotional services.

Q: Were you disappointed about anything in the publishing process that you might have felt didn't go quite right or didn't meet your expectations?

Overall, I was quite pleased with the process. However, it took longer than I had anticipated. I was continually pestering my publisher, trying to rush the process. Since I'd already done a fair amount of pre-publication publicity, I had people anxiously waiting for my novel to come out. They were trying to schedule book readings and launching parties...but I was still waiting for the product.

Q: Which was easier, the writing or the publishing/marketing of your book?

Good question! I LOVE writing....when I'm caught up in the flow, it's relatively easy. The words and scenes seem to bubble up from some place deep down. Other times, especially by the time you're buried in revisions and on your third draft or so, it's not as easy. Marketing can also be fun - it's a rush to do a reading and have people lined up to buy autographed copies of your book. But marketing, done right, can be very time-consuming. I'd rather be writing!

Q: What’s your next book going to be?

I have at least two or more "next" books, struggling for first place on my agenda! One will be a sequel to Waters of the Dancing Sky as requested by many of my readers. It will take place, again, on the wilderness islands of Rainy Lake along the Minnesota/Ontario international border but will venture farthar into Canada. I'm also currently researching and developing characters for another novel that will be set primarily in the old western ghost town of Virginia City, Montana. Tentatively titled "Amelia's Revenge," it will flow back and forth in time between the 1860's gold rush days and the world of 2012.

Q: And how about one final piece of advice to share with authors still in search of their first book-publishing contract?

Realize that the world of publishing is rapidly changing. You could wait a long time for a traditional publisher to take you on - and lose a significant amount of control over your work. Do not hesitate to check out some of the reputable non-traditional publishers. Examples include Llumina Press (my publisher), Author House, iUniverse, etc. They also offer an impressive array of editorial and marketing services. If you are determined to go 'traditional', your best bet is to obtain an agent first since many traditional publishers do not accept un-agented manuscripts.

Keep on writing - and best of luck to you all!

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New York Times' Reviewers' Top 10 Lists

2009-11-30T11:07:00.003-07:00

The venerable (or whatever word you choose) New York Times asked its reviewers to list their top 10 books for the year. Here's a quick look.

Michiko Kakutani's Top 10
Che's Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, By Michael Caser
The Good Soldiers, By David Finkel
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, By David Grann
Lit: A Memoir, By Mary Karr
True Compass: A Memoir, By Edward Kennedy
A Gate at The Stairs, By Lorrie Moore
Lark and Termite, By Jayne Anne Phillips
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, By Terry Teachout
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, By Wells Tower
In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, By David Wessel

Janet Maslin's Top 10
The Age of Wonder, By Richard Holmes
Await Your Reply, By Dan Chaon
The Cradle, By Patrick Somerville
How It Ended, By Jay McInerney
The Imperial Cruise, By James Bradley
The Lineup, Edited by Otto Penzler
Lords of Finance, By Liaquat Aha med
Passing Strange, By Martha A. Sandweiss
Under the Dome, By Stephen King
Zero at the Bone, By John Heidenry

Dwight Garner's Top 10
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, By Rebecca Solnit
Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, By Michael Norman and Elizabeth Norman
Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, By Novella Carpenter
When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood, By Said Sayrafiezadeh
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, By T.J. Stiles
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate and the Exploitation of Black Urban America, By Beryl Satter
Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, By Richard Wrangham
Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee, By Chloe Hopper
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places, By Bill Streever
Lords of the Sea, By John R. Hale

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AmSAW's "Writer for Hire" Unites Writers and Clients for Free

2009-11-23T10:01:00.004-07:00

At the American Society of Authors and Writers, we're devoted to helping our Professional Members find new venues for their writing. New PAYING venues. That's how writers earn a living, from writing.

With that in mind, we're delighted to announce a brand new program that painlessly unites writers with those in need of their talents.

Writer for Hire showcases professional freelance writers before thousands of editors, publishers, business executives, and professionals in search of writers for their most pressing projects. As an independent contractor for hire, our Professional Writer Members maintain complete control of all negotiations, and THEY keep all proceeds. It's free for everyone--writers and clients alike.

Want to learn more? Check out a Sample Listing.

Are you a writer who is not yet a Professional Member of AmSAW? Join Today so that we can begin promoting you and your work soon!

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Grand Central Editors: What They Like

2009-11-10T18:31:00.007-07:00

My agent handed me a copy of Grand Central Publishing's latest GCP at a Glance brochure, and I found some interesting reading in it. For starters, the profile of their editors is very revealing, not only about what they like and look for in a new book, but also about what we can assume many editors are searching for.

Want a peek? Here you go.

Executive Veep and Publisher Jamie Raab says she's drawn to "...thrillers that truly terrify me, love stories that move me deeply, books of humor that make me laugh all the way through and political books (all sides of the spectrum) that ignite my outrage. I love books with strong storylines and distinctive voices..."

Editor-in-Chief Deb Futter, in talking about what she's been acquiring lately and why: "...all of these books have one thing in common: a strong pull on my emotions--which comes out either as laughter or tears."

Veep and Twelve imprint Publisher Jonathan Karp says, "Ultimately, great storytelling is what matters most, along with authority and the kind of obsession that can only come from writers who are truly passionate about their subjects."

Executive Editor Caryn Karmatz Rudy, editorial director of the company's 5 Spot imprant, likes "...fresh, original voices in fiction and nonfiction for smart women."

Mitch Hoffman, Executive Editor, says, "...what I look for above all else are great storytellers--writers who entertain us, who inform us, and inspire us."

Senior Editor Karen Kosztolnyik is on the prowl for "...an intriguing voice, great storytelling, and a rollercoaster of emotion."

Associate Editor Michele Bidelspach wants "...fiction with a strong voice, unforgettable characters, and a great hook: think Emily Griffin, Jodi Picoult, and Jane Green."

Well, I think you get the point. After condensing these editors into a single palatable bite-sized package, what you come up with is simple: Strong Literary Voice. Great Storytelling. Passionate Writing.

And if you narrow these elements down to the single most commonly mentioned and sought-after element, you can't help but come up with "strong literary voice."

How's your own literary voice these days? If you're not sure, you'd better think about strengthening it. To find out more, check out AmSAW's "Writing Right," a complete compendium on how to write better, how to write more successfully, and how to get what you write published. All for gratis.

Fair enough?

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The Sound of Freedom Falling

2009-11-09T08:43:00.005-07:00

And from our Holy Cow, What's Happening to Our Freedom of the Press department:

An anonymous Democratic consultant claims in an L. A. Times, article to have received a call from the White House after making an appearance on Fox News. The friendly advice: Don't do it again!

The caller, according to the recipient, had an “intimidating tone” and a clear meaning. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, denying any involvement with such calls, says her staff has "encouraged people to appear on Fox." However, former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell—a Fox News contributor—said he had talked to Democratic consultants who claim the White House had warned them too. He refused to name names.

Now my question is this. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, is it really only a Democrat dressed up like a duck? And, if so, why is the White House so paranoid about the people having access to all points of view, including the truth? Isn't that the real purpose of the press--to disseminate the truth so that others may reach studied conclusions?

This country was founded upon two major principles: Freedom of Religion and Freedom of the Press. Without either one, we would have no freedoms at all. Think about it. And let us hear from you!

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Keep Your Options Open for New Markets

2009-10-26T18:07:00.017-06:00

Most writers spend a good portion of their lives looking for ways to expand their markets and generate new sources of income. Are you one of them? And, if so, do you take advantage of them all, even if they don't quite seem to be "right up your alley"?

I know one writer who had someone approach her about writing a family history for herself and her siblings. Now, that might not seem as if it would be the most exciting assignment around, and certainly not the best paying; but once she finished, one job led to another, until today, that writer is making more money than 95 percent of all freelance writers in America!

Someone else asked a writer I know to co-write a novel. Originally skeptical (what writer doesn't have fifty million of her own fiction ideas to turn into books!), she investigated the offer, fell in love with the story line and the characters, and connected with her co-author. And the rest, as they say, is history.

There are plenty of new and off-the-beaten-track ways for writers to generate income and find new avenues of literary expression. But the key is to remain open to exploring each and every one.

So, the next time someone comes to you saying he wishes he knew of a writer who could help him out...pay attention. It just might be the dream assignment of your life!

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Can a Writer Get Published without "Inside" Connections?

2009-09-18T12:16:00.011-06:00

Question: I've sent out several query letters for my book and have received only form letters back. I've had several people tell me that the book is great, but if you don't know someone on the 'inside' of the industry, or go to a conference, or pay someone, forget about getting anyone interested in your work.

I can't really afford to pay anyone to read my manuscript at this time, as I'm already paying my assistant to help me edit the work. It is very difficult for me to attend writing conferences due to my speaking and work schedule.

I guess what I'm wondering is; in your experience, without a lot of contacts, is getting published a lost cause?

Please understand I totally 'get it' if it requires a financial investment, and if I'm unable to make that commitment, that is just the way it goes. - K. T.

Answer: With all of the books I have published over the years, I still need an agent to rep me to get new contracts, and those are by no means "automatic." The industry is particularly cautious about taking on new properties these days, what with the economic climate and all. From my observations, I'd say that one out of twenty writers gets published when he is repped by a good, reliable, reputable literary agent (not easy to find). Without representation, I'm guessing that number would fall to one out of every two or three hundred. Neither of those are very impressive odds.

Part of the problem, of course, is that publishers don't trust untested writers. If they put money into a property that never reaches fruition because the writer takes a hike or fails to deliver a satisfactory manuscript or delivers one that just won't sell, they're stuck holding the bag. Collecting too many bags full of nothing leads to collecting something totally else entirely: unemployment. At least with an agency-repped writer, a publisher has some degree of confidence that the agent has done some vetting and believes in the writer, his potential, and his ethics.

Another part of the problem is the tremendous number of unsolicited submissions a typical editor receives in a week. More than 99 percent of these are not something the editor is interested in, not something the publisher will publish (children's books, poetry, sci-fi, or whatever), not well enough written to merit publication, or not targeted to the publisher's niche market. Sending a romance novel to Workman Publishing makes about as much sense as sending a how-to book to Black Velvet Seductions.

So what has this to do with the difficulty of getting an unagented property published? When all these overworked and overloaded editors want to lighten their load (and they can't do it by ignoring their currently viable titles and contracted authors), they do it by rejecting all of those unsolicited and (mostly) unsuitable manuscripts. One mass e-mailing or one afternoon's work for a harried assistant can lessen an editor's load by several hundred properties. "Look, ma, no In Basket!"

The better editors, of course, will at least take a look at the first few lines or paragraphs of a manuscript and, perhaps, set aside those properties that he thinks MIGHT have merit to read more fully at a later date. Other editors simply send them on their way with the ubiquitous pre-printed rejection slip firmly attached.

As for paying someone to get an "in" to a publisher, it's not advisable. Agents who charge reading fees are almost unanimously viewed by the industry as unscrupulous scammers. Publishers who charge to produce a book are either scammers or vanity presses that turn out "printed" copies of your book with no marketing or sales backing behind them. You could accomplish that much by going to your local Kinko's.

The only time you might consider paying someone to help you get published is when you need a reputable book or script doctor. AmSAW and several other reputable editors will work with authors to get a property in shape to begin shopping it around (making syntax, story line, grammar, and formatting suggestions to bring the property up to professional level). In addition, AmSAW has a standing invitation from several respected literary agents who will look at any properties its editors guarantee to be of professional caliber.

Sans those options, your alternatives are pretty much to find a legitimate publisher on your own or to find a literary agent who loves your property and wants to represent you, which is even more difficult a task (if you can believe it) than finding a publisher. Neither option is easy, but writers succeed all the time. It's unfortunate that they don't succeed very often or very quickly. I know writers who have sent their material around literally for years before getting a nibble from an interested publisher. I guess that's what makes the concept of being a published author so "special."

As someone once said, if you want to be a published author more than anything else in life, sooner or later it will happen.

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Will the Real Acorn Please Stand Up!

2009-09-17T17:07:00.004-06:00

From our "From Mighty Oaks, Tiny Acorns Grow" Department:

Harvey Bloginger, who writes a weekly column on truth and ethics in government, wanted to get to the bottom of the recent Acorn community group scandal in which the organization advised applicants on various ways of breaking the law. The most egregious example was an Acorn representative telling a prospective owner of a house of ill repute (for underage girls, no less) that Acorn had no problem in helping to set them up in business. Acorn, which is scheduled to receive billions of dollars in public funds this year, showed little remorse.

Bloginger: Ms. Ripemoff, you recently were caught on videotape by a couple of people posing as prostitutes trying to get funding through Acorn to set up a brothel for 13-year-old girls.

Ripemoff: Yes, uh-huh.

Bloginger: And these underage girls were to be used to provide sexual favors to the brothel's clients.

Ripemoff: Yes, that is my understanding.

Bloginger: And they told you that the girls were to be supplied by a South American cartel running a children's sex-slave ring.

Ripemoff: Yes, that is correct.

Bloginger: In the process, you admitted on-camera to having once run an illegal "escort service" yourself, so you certainly had no quarrel with setting these people up in a brothel paid for by taxpayer's dollars.

Ripemoff: That is correct.

Bloginger: You also confessed to having killed your former husband in cold blood.

Ripemoff: Yes, that's right.

Bloginger: What do you say now that an undercover video camera recorded your murder confession as well as your offer to help these people set up a child-prostitution and sex-for-sale ring?

Ripemoff: Well, honey, the way I see it, it's like this: everybody needs a hobby.

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Where Have All the Editors Gone?

2009-08-22T10:54:00.005-06:00

I wonder where all the editors have gone. I think I know, but I don't want to admit that I'm right. So, instead, I will continue to wonder. Where have they gone?

I know a writer who has written a moving, funny, and memorable memoir concerning her experiences about turning sixty. The demographics for marketing the book are huge: this is the original Baby Boomer generation, remember, the generation that still buys books and actually reads them? Yet, she can't find a publisher. Or, more accurately, she can't find an editor willing to take a chance on her or her book by publishing it.

You see, this writer has a terminal flaw: it's called No Name. Oh, by that I don't mean she is nameless, of course, but she has no celebrity status, no national recognition. She's not Julia Child or Justin Timberlake or Janet Jackson or Monroe Doctrine or any of those big names. She is, in effect, a memoirist-non-gratis.

Why should that matter? Here's why.

Editors point to the sagging store shelves of memoirs with titles screaming out for sale--the vast majority written by celebrities. (You know, those people whom Tom Wolf once described as "famous for being famous.") Without name recognition, these editors fear, the book will languor in sales-statistics limbo forever.

They may be correct. They may have statistics and other documentation that shows them to be correct. But that doesn't make them right.

At one time, an editor who fell in love with a project would pursue its life's history through publication and marketing and sales all the way into the option of film rights based upon the story. But that editor is long gone from the scene that plays out each day along New York's Publisher's Row. That editor is a dinosaur, a fossil left over from an era when people had integrity and moral fiber and weren't afraid to work hard for a living, to build up a sweat working toward the accomplishment of a goal they really believed in.

The last time I recall seeing an editor actually sweat was when the corporate CFO came to town to talk to the executive editor about lagging book sales. I know. I was one of those editors once.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live in this century, too, and I understand why the bottom line is so critical to corporate America. When corporate profits dwindle, stock prices fall, shareholder dividends fall, confidence in management falls, and the blame falls on the Board. (Old joke: "What's the surest way to lose money in the stock market?" Answer: "Buy G. E.")

Once the blame starts flying, it's only a hop, skip, and a jump until people find themselves on the unemployment line.

I get all that. I really do.

But once--okay, maybe twice or three times, even--in every publishing season, couldn't one editor somewhere, at some publishing house, stand up and root for the underdog, insist upon staking his or her reputation (not to mention job) on the success of a quirky offbeat "little book" by an untested "no-name" author? Just once?

See. I told you when I began this article. I already know the answer to that, but I just don't want to admit that I'm right.

Smoke if you got 'em.

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American Society of Authors and Writers

December's SCRIBE Media Magazine Is Out

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U. S. Author "Licensed To Thrill"

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Does Everyone Have a POD Dog in This Fight???

Give Editors What They Want

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Oh, the (One Million) Books They Published!

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Kirkus Reviews Dodges Ax

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Tight Economy Creates New Freelance Opportunities

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Our Advice to Authors: Drop Dead

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Alexa Ranks AmSAW Tops

Story Collections Poised for Comeback?

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AmSAW's "Writer for Hire" Unites Writers and Clients for Free

Grand Central Editors: What They Like

The Sound of Freedom Falling

Keep Your Options Open for New Markets

Can a Writer Get Published without "Inside" Connections?

Will the Real Acorn Please Stand Up!

Where Have All the Editors Gone?