Ever wonder what a publishing masters thesis looked like?

Today while catching up on a few blog posts in my always frightening RSS aggregator of doom, I was reminded of the site Wordle by Luv YA. And for shits and giggles, I’ve been dicking around with it tonight. Here’s my masters thesis:

David Eddings Passes Away at 77

I came to love ooks much later than most folks.  Aside from a childhood obsession with Star Wars, the gift of a book called Fahrenheit 451,  and the dubbed anime aired that on Toonami, I didn’t get into too much fantasy or science fiction.  (At least by comparison to how geek I am for it now-a-days.) I don’t know why, but I never sought it out.  All that changed with The Big Box of Books.  At a yard sale one summer when I was in high school, one particular house changed my life.  I bought a trampoline for five dollars, a set of samurai swords for fifteen, and for hell of it box of books for five.  What I didn’t realize was that if was -all- SF/F.  That box of book and the loan of Eye of the World by Robert Jordan that same week got me my start in the genre.  There were about fifty books in that box, but the reason that I write this is that included in it was a complete set of the Belgariad and Mallorean.  While working my way through the Wheel of Time (not wanting to out pace my friends who were simultaneously getting started on Jordan’s series)  I started with those two sets by David Eddings.

By now many of you will have heard about his passing on June 2. News of this saddens me greatly because his works were there at the beginning of things for me.  It is hard to imagine how different my life would have been – since for most of my life I wanted to go into business – without a few certain writers who’s works energized me to aspire to something different (much poorer one, but one that’s a lot of fun :p).  So RIP David Eddings, and thank you.

A BEA Moment & Mind Your Manners Alice Roosevelt

So there was one particular heart-warming moment from BEA that I wanted to share with you all.  Back in undergrad I interened with a children’s publisher back in Atlanta called Peachtree Publishers.  It was my first ever forray into the publishing world, and in marketing no less which largely helped to lead me to my next two internships (one in scholarly marketing, the next in children’s editorial) and then finally my current job.  What was really great about that particular internship was that I got to do tasks for the other departments from time to time and was invited to sit in on the acquisitions meetings.  I got the broad spectrum of the process and it was great.  Prior to the acquisitions meetings, we got to read the manuscripts and practice filling out reader’s reports for each.  At one such meeting there was a manuscript that would become Mind Your Manner’s Alice Roosevelt, a children’s picture book pubbing this fall, and at BEA last weekend I got to flip through the BLAD.  

 

 

Mind Your Manners Alice Roosevelt
By Leslie Kimmelman Illustrated by Adam Gustavson
ISBN: 978-1561454921 List Price: $16.95
Pub Date: September 1, 2009
Publisher: Peachtree Publishers 

 

 

 

 

I smiled from ear to ear.  This was the first time that I could say, I remember where it all began.  It’s nearly the finished product; talk about your warm fuzzies.  This was a pretty major milestone.  Anyway, just felt like sharing.  I know I don’t usually blog about picture books here, but I want you all to by this book if you’ve got a tiny tike in your life. Personal bias aside, the artwork is lovely and the story is a cute one with a some educational value in the details it reveals about Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency.  What I also liked was that Alice is a young woman and not a child (historically true).   There is a lot of anxiety for them when trying to relate to one’s elders and especially teenagers.  For children sometimes its nice to see older folks behaving a little mischievous. I know I had the hardest time with my cousins when I was a child.  I was all of six when the eldest was fifteen. She acted like an adult, but sometimes she would play with me on my level.  But the mood swings were lightning fast and it was just all together too stressful to be fun.  I just couldn’t keep up or act old enough for her with my pretty princess make-up kit.  So I waited glumly until she felt like being “immature” once again.

/End of Line

Orbit’s $1 E-book: Midnight Never Come

Introducing June’s Offering for the One Dollar E-book from Orbit: Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan.  Yet another great selection from Orbit.  I’ve had my eye on this for one for a while now; looking forward to trying the series out.  The next book in the Onyx Court series, In Ashes Lie, will be out this month.

Summary from Amazon:

Stunningly conceived and exquisitely achieved, this rich historical fantasy portrays the Elizabethan court 30 years into the reign of the Virgin Queen, often called Gloriana. Far below ground, her dark counterpart, heartless Invidiana, rules England’s fae. Brennan (Warrior and Witch) pairs handsome young courtier Michael Deven, an aspiring agent under spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, with bewitching fae Lune, who attempts to avoid Invidiana’s wrath by infiltrating Walsingham’s network in mortal guise. History and fantasy blend seamlessly as Deven and Lune tread their precarious tightropes between loyalty and betrayal. Brennan’s myriad fantastical creations ring as true as her ear for Elizabethan and faerie dialogue. With intriguing flashbacks to historical events and a cast of deftly drawn characters both real and imagined, Brennan fleshes out the primal conflict of love and honor pitted against raging ambition and lust for power in a glittering age when mortals could well be such fools as to sell their souls forever.

New Moon Trailer

Well it’s here Twilight fans: the New Moon Trailer.  For a movie trailer it was oddly straightforward.  I am so glad we got to see a transformation.  That had been my biggest worry for New Moon because werewolf transformations are notoriously bad, IMO.  In Twilight it had been the meadow scene.

 Not sure what I think of it yet, still ruminating about the clip, but at least there is nothing to wonder about.  

Book Expo America 2009 and a tiny bit of Aperture Science

BEA wrapped up Sunday and now that I’ve had my rest, it is time for some post-show impressions.  Or it would be, but it is honestly hard to process it all.  This was my first time at the conference so it was an experience to say the least.  Unfortunately I delted the photos I took with my phone to show you the size of it.  

There were so many booths, so many publishers.  Surprisingly though, attendance was not what I expected but this was my first BEA so what do I know!  Saturday was light and Sunday was astoundingly dead.  I was told at the show by a few people that next year’s show may be entirely during the week. 

Of the ARC’s that I picked up the ones that I am most excited about are:

Fire by Kristin Cashore

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Ghostgirl Homecoming by Tonya Hurley

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl

The Girl in the Arena by Lisa Haines

And the odd one of the list:  Connected – The surprising power of social networks and how they shape our lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.

My favorite panel of the weekend was Friday night’s 7×20x21 during which several publishing professionals were invited to share what inspired them about their jobs and their hopes for the industry for seven minutes using twenty power point slides.  We’ve been hearing so much bad news what with the economic times that it was nice note to end the work week on. Every speaker did a fantastic job.  There were a lot of smiles and a lot of laughs, and even a reference to the game Portal. (Though I imagine only a few of us actually got that one.)

All in all, I’m making a note here….HUGE SUCCESS!  Tomorrow though it’s back to work for those of us who are still alive.

Do androids Twitter about their dreams of sheep?

I certainly wouldn’t know, but The Book Bark does now. As in Twitters, I promise to try and keep the sheep down to a minimum.

Sorry about misleading you’all here with the unrelated title.  I’m running a fever after having hauled my laundry down to the machines in the pouring rain.  My brain is burning and I am feeling more than a little bit addled.  Anyway, off topic!  

All right I’ve been dragging my feet with regards to the Twitter phenomenon, but I think it’s finally time to throw my hat into the ring.  Part of my issue with the whole Twitter thing was that I just hadn’t figured out what I wanted to use this blog’s twitter for.  Well I finally reached a decision this weekend; I will no longer be doing the Blogosphere Barks feature as a round-up post of links.  Instead the feature will be moved entirely to the twitter account where from time to time I will also blab about what I’m reading as I’m reading it or other malfunctions of my brain.  This decision was actually a pretty hard one to make.  I love reading link round-ups and find out a lot of information this way from sites such as Enter the Octopus and SF Signal who disseminate an impressive amount of information this way. It is nice having it all right there in one post.  I realize my round-ups are few and far between and I regret that.  I read a lot more than I write about on the internet, but the #1 reason that I don’t share these links more often is that it takes a surprising amount of time just to write and format the post.  I hope that Twitter will be a better medium for this and will enable me to bring you better content.  

So here is the link should you like to follow me on Twitter as well and I hope you will.  I’ve also added the Twitter widget to the blog.

~ Darcy

The Third Gatekeeper In The Publishing Chain

By now we’ve all had a gander or a chuckle and may have perhaps experienced moments of outrage over author May Walters’s article: “The Talent Killers: How literary agents are destroying literature, and what publishers can do to stop them” I waffled back and forth between the laughing and outrage.

To her credit, the author was very loyal to her position and committed a lot of time and effort to commenters without becoming flustered or flying into a rage. As for the article itself, I was unimpressed. It was the fairly typical complaints of the uninformed. I also fail to see how it was necessary and right to demean an entire profession of individuals whom you don’t know in order to free oneself from the uncaring (and presumed moronic, greedy, and/or trivial) agent – editor publishing model. If the pressures of the agent hunt as a road to publication are too stifling creatively…um, don’t query? Why is it necessary to blacklist yourself in order to free yourself?

Now I’m going to stop myself there because the point of this post was not to comment in depth on this article. My reasons for this are:

A.) I didn’t agree with a lick of it so everything that I have to say is pretty much one-sided.

B.) Everything that I would like to say has pretty much already been said. Specifically see the posts of agent Nathan Bransford, Fenestra, and Nick Mamatas. There were a lot of good points brought out in the discussion but at the end of 250 comments those three names were the ones I remembered. And finally…

C.) Something odd occurred to me while reading through the article and its comments. There was a third party missing from the whole equation that no one seemed to be recognizing or pointing the finger at, and that, folks, is what I really want to talk to you about.

Bookstores

Writers tend to look at the agent/editor hunt as their one and only –major- hurdle. It’s often presumed that once a publishing house purchases the rights to a manuscript the rest is in the publisher’s hands after a few rounds of editing involving author, editor, and a copyeditor or two. After that though, the author’s part is done. The publisher has entire departments working on the production, marketing, and sales of the author’s book (though it is only one of many). Certainly many authors are willing to put their efforts into grass-roots marketing via their own bloging platforms and connections, but the major marketing expenses such as advertising, co-op, and events and/or signings are handled by the publisher when the budget allows. The author will very rarely have any communication with sales, ever, unless it is a large title and the publisher feels that this author is so charismatic and strong that sitting them down at a lunch with the book buyers may influence a store’s buy.

Meaning that early on, many writers have a very narrow understanding of the complete road to publication. They’re looking at it from acquisition-on because that’s the stage that is really most important to them. The contract. The chance to maybe make it as a bestseller now that their work is going to be in print one day soon (theoretically). Publishers, editors, and agents, however, are all looking ahead and working BACKWARDS from sell-in to acquisition. Can we project this book to sell well into the bookstores? In what quantities do you think we can get this book out in? What quantities do we want to get out? What kind of marketing and co-op do we need to plan for to influence the buy in this way? It is a different world-view. Before a book is ever signed up, an editor has already projected the profit margins on the idealized finished book and presented that to the business side of the publishing house. When agents and editors talk about whether the book will sell they are not just talking about how many books they can sell to the consumer. First, they have to consider whether the book will be visible to the consumer. If the bookstore is not on board with a title, no matter how high the level of quality is of the writing after all the editing, you won’t be seeing it on the shelves.

When a bookstore takes on a book, they do so for very limited amounts of time with the understanding that they can also return the unsold stock before ninety days is out.. Just because your manuscript is picked up by a publisher and immediately made available once it pubs in all of the major chains such as B&N, Borders Group, or Books-A-Million, do not assume as a writer that your book will always be available. The average initial buy period used to be eight weeks. That’s only two months, folks. If your book hasn’t sold-through or at least sold steadily, the bookstore will return those books and not re-order. Eight weeks is not a long time, especially for a mid-list author who is just beginning to build his or her brand. The situation is so much worse now since four week buys are starting to come through more and more, especially for non-celebrity or franchise authors. It’s tough out there folks. And I’m not just talking about tough-times for the author. Imagine that you are the publisher in an industry that returns an incredibly low profit margin on the goods it produces. Authors complain about how paltry royalty percentages are. It’s really not any better on the publisher’s end (oftentimes worse) once the expenses are paid including developmental fees and company overhead. We’re really all in the same boat, not making much money but doing what we love to do.

Anyway, imagine you’re the publisher and you’ve made your plans hoping this would be an eight week buy with the potential for re-order. Suddenly word comes through that B&N is only going to take the book on as a four week trial and it’s expected that Borders will follow-suit because of that. What are you going to do? Obviously you’ll be watchful over the next four weeks hoping that the sell-through was enough to convince the retail chains to re-order. You can either suspend what marketing activities you haven’t paid for yet in order to cut your losses or increase the budget for that title hoping that the extra effort on your part convinces the buyer to increase their buy as well. Perhaps you’ll be more cautious the next time a project similar in scope, audience, and cost comes through the pipelines from a mid-list author. This in turn affects the agents pitching to the publisher and all the while the grip gets tighter around the mid-list author. It is sad. It’s unfortunate, but that is the state of things. I am glad that self-publishing technologies have advanced as far as they come. I honestly do believe in the value that the publisher adds to the finished book or I wouldn’t have pursued a career in the industry, but as a writer too, I am glad that an author has another option. The traditional publishing model is tough, and it’s not for everyone.

I write this not to point blame at the retail chains. I write this only to point out that they too are gatekeepers, the third and oftentimes overlooked gatekeeper in the publishing cycle. A bookstore is not a library but a business with concerns, overheads, and mortgages just like the rest of us, and it is really not fair to whine about them either. In the end they have no control over consumer purchasing habits; they can only try to influence them. If the book is selling well they’ll be happy to re-order, but they need books to move and move quickly before next month’s promising releases arrive. With all the books being published in the U.S. there is just simply a lack of shelf-space to put it all, and there is only so much room in-stores for a backlist. There are hundreds upon thousands of titles releasing every season. The book buyers have to make some pretty tough calls when looking at all of this and setting up their stores to offer the widest ranging selection to appeal to the consumer. Every book on-sale may not be to your liking, and I’m sure there is a lot out there you might consider utter crap, but you are not everyone. The book buyers are trying to weigh the needs and wants of a variety of individuals and personalities who come to the brick and mortar buildings in search of many different things.

/End of Line

~ Darcy

Agent For A Day: Quick Observation

If you hadn’t heard, literary agent Nathan Bransford hosted an event on his blog called Agent For A Day.  On Monday, April 13th, Nathan began posting 50 queries (considered a light-load for an average day of submissions) to his blog and allowed readers one week to review the submissions and post either their rejection or request in the comments of each individual submission.  Participants were only allowed to request five manuscripts.  The goal was to give writers an chance to experience what it is like being a literary agent.  

I thought the exercise was genius, but I had to post about one curious observation.  For all the angst writers so frequently express after receiving the form rejection, it was a little surprising to me to see most of the responses being form rejections.  And some I thought walked a very fine line between constructive criticism and unnecessary snark.  Very few participants seemed to dole-out the constructive responses to queries so craved by the writing community.  

Anyway, had to share.

~ Darcy

Hamlet As Told Through Facebook

Some of you may remember Pride and Prejudice as told through Facebook.  Well today a friend sends me a link to Hamlet - somewhat truncated and less of a riot than P&P but amusing and rightly full of awesome all the same.

Enjoy!  And will someone please give Dune the Facebook treatment?  Pretty please?

~ Darcy