WRITING ON THE ETHER: Quality – Do You Give a Royal Rump?

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My Call to the Ring: A Memoir of a Girl Who Yearns to Box

by Deirdre Gogarty & Darrelyn Saloom

In the 1980s, boxing is illegal for women in Ireland. But Deirdre Gogarty has only one dream: to be the first Irish woman to win a world boxing title. How can a shy, young misfit become a professional boxer in a country that bans women from the sport? Gogarty follows her calling to compete and journeys from the Irish Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, from outcast to center ring, from the depths of depression to the championship fight of her life.

“If you’ve ever wondered why and how people do extraordinary, almost impossible things, read My Call to the Ring. Deirdre Gogarty knocked me out with this book.”

—Ted Mann, former National Lampoon editor, television writer and producer

Find out more on Amazon and download a sample to your Kindle.

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Table of Contents

1. Quality Time / Rollyson, Smith, Bransford
2. eBook Best-Sellers: Where Are the ‘Indies’? / Shatzkin, Weinman, Owen
3. Respect: Coming and Going / Bourne, Wolff
4. Social Media: Verification at last / Friedman
5. Authors: Remember Amanda Hocking? / Cook
6. Copyright: Or Creditright? / Jarvis
7. Craft: More Best-Seller Lists / Ferriss
8. Craft: More Copyright / Frazer
9. Craft: Exercising Your Muse / Ross
10. Books: Reading on the Ether
11. Last Gas: Franck in Her Own Right / Phillips

UPDATE: I’m informed on Friday (August 24) that Digital Book World WILL begin adding authors’ names to its ebook listings in its new eBook Best-Seller List, starting Monday (August 27) with its second weekly release of the list. Glad to know that a whiff of our Ether here seems to have been inhaled.

Here is our original post on the matter: EXTRA ETHER: DBW’s Best-Seller List

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Quality Time / Rollyson, Smith, Bransford

 T. S. Eliot scorned her self-promotion, calling Lowell the “demon saleswoman of poetry.”

That’s Amy Lowell biographer Carl Rollyson, writing this week exclusively for the Virginia Quarterly Review at the request of Jane Friedman, VQR’s digital editor, hashtag unto herself, and long-suffering host of the Ether.

Friedman sets up the arrival of this important, brief article, with an editor’s note:

Last month, I tweeted: “Is it just me, or do many professional authors lack a serious professional attitude toward their websites?” In response, Carl Rollyson (@crollyson) tweeted: “I wonder how Amy Lowell would have constructed a website. She was good at showing publishers how to advertise.” So I asked Carl to expand on this idea in a blog post.

And explain he does, in a piece pointedly titled Quality Work Does Not Speak for Itself—It Must Be Marketed.

She did not believe that the work spoke for itself. An author had to speak up for her work and do so with a savvy understanding of the marketplace.

And yet you need not walk far down any hallway to hear somebody claiming that “good work will out,” “it always rises to the top,” “you just focus on writing the best book you can and the rest will take care of itself.”

When Matt Gartland put together his new “In Three Words” entry at Digital Book World’s Expert Publishing Blog this week, he asked What Does Discovery Mean to You?

What three words did he get from Bob Mayer, author and publisher?

Great writing, characters.

This, as authors face 32 million active titles in Books in Print, as Bowker’s Laura Dawson tells us. More about that is in this edition of the Ether (direct link). And the “Dawson 32 Million” doesn’t include self-published work. Or non-US books.

Only now is the overwhelming truth of “too many books” beginning to register fully, as the digital dumptruck backs up and drops off new titles so fast that you can’t even publish…a good book about it.

Here’s author Kelvin Smith writing, a bit sheepishly, about his new book, The Publishing Business: From p-books to e-books (curiously priced at $30.76 in paperback with no Kindle edition in sight) at Ed Nawotka’s Publishing Perspectives.

In his rather dour article, Smith describes the exhaustion most of us feel.

The industry! the industry! is at best wearing itself out, and at worst tearing us apart. Smith writes:

The tone in the publishing blogosphere is frequently hysterical about this or that tech development, legal battle, industry sector realignment, IP conflict, financial or commercial brouhaha, and the overall impression when you read enough of this stuff, is of an industry, a profession even, in a blue funk.

Some of this hysteria is generated by the eager alarmists in our communities, as we know, the sneering royal asses I call the “snot-nerds” among us.

But Smith also has a roll of the eyes for the “not him again” pundits who seem to turn up on every agenda and panel discussion because perpetuating the flux is good for business.

Conference upon conference seems to address the same issues, and attract a relatively small group of people apparently paid just to think about the future of publishing. They race from conference venue to conference venue, creating and dominating the debate, and why not? They are paid to do just that.

Smith is gracious enough to concede, tacitly:

Writing a book about publishing while these changes are going on seems like trying to hit a very erratically moving market…to make sense of the rapidly changing publishing landscape.

Smith cites three key impressions from trying to hit that “very erratically moving market” in a book about books:

1. Process over pith. Bright-shiny stuff leads a lot of our debate. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Smith asks, “if more publishers were asking and answering questions about what publishing is for — and reasserting that publishing purpose is as important as publishing process?”
2. Parochialism. “The way in which publishing reconciles its local anchorage with its global outreach is an important thing for publishers to keep in mind as they develop their businesses in the twenty-first century.”
3. Vanity over value. Lastly, he writes, the overtake of publishing by entertainment interests means “many publishing people have lost the belief that they are doing something worthwhile.”

Perhaps much of mainstream publishing has not done itself a favour by being seduced by popular culture’s attraction to celebrity over substance. Surely it’s time to pull ourselves together.

OK, then, let’s hear it for quality, right? And the chutzpah to sell it with gusto as Rollyson says Lowell would have done.

Mad Lib: With ____the publishing industry will likely ____. For most publishers the worst thing to do is ___. My best advice would be ____.

— Edward Nawotka (@EdNawotka) August 22, 2012

Well, not so fast.

Nathan Bransford

Nathan Bransford has chosen this moment of near-clarity to raise his hand and ask if we all aren’t just too het up over this quality crap.

I’ve long held the belief that the publishing industry cares too much about a certain level of writing quality, and I’d include myself in the camp as well.

Bransford can’t help himself, of course, he’s in California, you know how that goes, and it’s been a long, hot summer, and he’s reading Fifty Shades of You Know What, and it obviously is doing everything for his sense of literary discernment we might expect. Get this:

So far I don’t think it’s anywhere near as bad as I had heard people complain of it, but yeah, it’s not, nor do I think it’s supposed to be, Shakespeare.

I can’t do an intervention, I’m on the East Coast. Is there anybody near Bransford who can reach the man? Ye shall know him by the post headlined Does the Publishing Industry Care Too Much About Writing Quality?

In the rousing range of responses to that question about quality, Bransford seems to be getting a good bit of buy-in from people who say that readers are much happier with “a good story” than they are with “good writing.”

Bransford, himself, loads his question this way:

I’m unconvinced the majority of the reading public cares about “good” writing. They care about stories and settings and characters. Prose? I’m not sure I buy it…Should the industry still try to maintain the same level of quality of writing even if the public doesn’t care?

Just for the record, I’ve read some of Bransford’s Jacob Wonderbar material and he does not skimp on quality, himself.

And I see no one in comments to his post asking this: Has “the public” ever cared as much about quality as artists and artisans have? — in writing, in theater, in dance, in music, in journalism, in photography and other visual arts?

So now we’re to turn to the public, with its fascination for princely posteriors, His Highness’ heinie, the Seat of St. James, the butt of Balmoral, God save his glutes — and so say we Hip! Hip! …? Those people are to be “the deciders” of what’s appropriate as a goal in publishing now?

Surely @Porter_Anderson can find a clever way to fit Prince Harry's butt into this week's Writing on the Ether…

— Colleen Lindsay (@ColleenLindsay) August 23, 2012

 

Check our Last Gas today about Magnum photographer Martine Franck. Look at some of her photos. You can bet Harry’s royal rear that Franck didn’t toss out a few “good enough” ringers along the way because “the public” didn’t care as much as she did about quality.

Bransford writes:

We’re about to test this on a massive scale as the books that would never have made it through the publishing process in manuscript form due to subpar prose are out there ready to take off, sell a gajillion copies and prove the industry wrong.

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“About to test” has already landed in our eBook Best-Sellers List section right after this one. Stay with us for another gulp of gas and we’ll let you in on how many “gajillion copies” of “the books that would never have made it through the publishing process” seem to be selling so far.

Meanwhile, let’s be clear about this essay from Carl Rollyson, biographer of Dana Andrews, Picasso, Lillian Hellman, and (coming in January) Sylvia Plath.

I would not like to be visited by Amy Lowell’s full-figured ghost for getting this wrong.

Rollyson writes that Lowell started with — and supported — quality work with her sharp sense for business. And he writes this in excellent prose of his own, by the way. I hear the sound of no Ethernauts running in disgust from Rollyson’s own good work, do you?

Rollyson:

I know this kind of proactive engagement is not for every author… But for others—like Amy Lowell and like me—imagining and creating an audience for one’s work is what writing is all about.

Of 16 people represented in Gartland’s “In Three Words” responses, four mention metadata:

• Fans, covers, metadata
• Metadata, marketing, handselling
• Metadata gets sexy
• Metadata, brands, cross-selling

Rollyson is telling us that Lowell likely would gladly have made that five mentions of metadata. He speculates that “social media and electronic platforms…I’m sure would have thrilled her.”

He describes, in fact, a tireless champion not only of her own visibility but also on behalf of colleagues in Imagism.

Rollyson describes Lowell crawling over every detail of her own book presentations, “fonts…page layouts…catalog announcements.”

You can bet she would not be against social media, labeling it some new imposition on the author, more comfortable with the easier and cozier ways that prevailed in the old days.

He’s not saying anything to suggest that Lowell would rushed out to “throw up some ebooks on the Internet,” as James Scott Bell laughingly puts it.

Lowell saw no reason why quality work of the first order should not be aggressively introduced into the marketplace.

Maybe the reason Lowell would have been a happy platformer, per Rollyson, but one who never sacrificed quality to the commercial, is because she cared not just about being read — but about who read her. Rollyson one more time:

As she put it, she was not trying to create readers of poetry, she was appealing to readers who already had a spark of poetry in them that could be ignited.

Get that? Maybe it’s all in who you’d like as readers.

Or do you give

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The word "curation" called and wants its meaning back.

— Brett Sandusky (@bsandusky) August 22, 2012

 

eBook Best-Sellers: Where Are the ‘Indies’? / Shatzkin, Weinman, Owen

There is not one self-published ebook in the overall Top 25 and only two appear at all, both on the lowest price band (from zero to $2.99).

Mike Shatzkin voiced for all of us one of the key reasons that Digital Book World’s new weekly eBook Best-Seller List’s debut on Monday went off like a cherry bomb.

The arrival of this new view into ebook sales across three major retailers had several surprises in store — the kinds that prove we aren’t as far along in understanding the digital dynamic as we’d hoped.

I gave the list an early swipe in my Extra Ether that morning.

Sarah Weinman at Publishers Lunch clarified in her write Digital Book World Launches Aggregated eBook Bestseller List that in a given list, you’ll see an ebook represented by the “minimum price that appeared at any point during the week on any retailer.”

That’s an important point, of course, because algorithm-driven fluidity of ebook pricing is one of the most vexing elements in the market for many.

Laura Hazard Owen

Laura Hazard Owen at paidContent in her write, Digital Book World aims for a more accurate ebook bestseller list, notes that the DBW list is an attempt to get a more nearly accurate picture of the market, in which:

A low-priced ebook that sells many copies is still not necessarily driving as much revenue as a higher-priced book a couple of spots lower down the list.

And Shatzkin went on to enumerate more surprises in the result of the work by Iobyte Solutions’ Dan Lubart for DBW.

What is even more interesting to me, and which defies the notion that the big publishers aren’t aware of the value of lower pricing, is how the list breaks down in the lowest price tier (they list 10 titles): Random House 2, Self-published 2, Entangled 2, HarperCollins 2, Soho 1, Penguin 1.

• Six of the top 10 titles under $3 belong to the Big Six.
• The Big Six plus Scholastic have seven of the top 10 in the $3-$7.99 price band as well.
• Above $8, only Kensington breaks the monopoly of the Big Six, with one title.

So it would appear that the notion that The Big Six are hurting authors by pricing their books too high is not borne out by this data.

And what also comes across in this first outing for the list is that the Top 25 is dominated not only by ebooks published by major houses but also by price points on the upper end.

I count 17 of the Top 25 selling at $9.99 or higher. Four more are priced between $5 and $7.99.

Thus, in this first week of the list’s analysis:

• Self-publishing doesn’t have as much presence as might have been expected;
• The Big Six come out in a far more commanding position, up and down the price bands, than many might have anticipated; and
• It doesn’t look as if super-low pricing may be as effective as some have hoped — nor does it look like higher pricing points (whether through agency arrangements or otherwise) are as daunting to readers as some have asserted.

Keep an eye on DBW’s release each Monday of the new list.

As Shatzkin writes:

It will be particularly interesting to watch how the lists change in the various price bands later this fall if the DoJ settlement is approved and the retailers are free to set prices on the output of half of the Big Six.

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Respect: Coming and Going / Bourne, Wolff

If your book isn’t selling, literary agents are not to blame. It may be that your book doesn’t really belong in mainstream commercial publishing…Or it may be that…you haven’t done the groundwork you need to do to get out of the slush pile and onto a literary agent’s radar.

In “A Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents at The Millions, Michael Bourne absolves agents everywhere of everything for every reason, amen.

They simply don’t have time to read all the books they’d like to read, even the ones from writers who sound like they might be talented. So, agents work with people they know, and friends of people they know.

About a third of the way in, he adds:

I should know because I recently finished a novel and have spent the last six months hearing polite, carefully hedged versions of “no.”

Aha. A self-counseling session is full on. Bourne’s talkin’ ’bout the man in the mirror. And somehow, while making all the right noises, the more Bourne writes, the more Stepford he sounds.

Folio (Literary Management) co-founder Scott Hoffman explains that the agency receives roughly 100,000 unsolicited queries a year…Hoffman has taken on four new writers in the last year, only one of whom came in through the slush pile…putting the odds of an author without connections getting Hoffman to take on his or her book at roughly 1 in 11,111.

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The odds of someone wanting to take on Bourne as a client seem to get more remote by the sentence.

If that sounds like I’m saying, “It’s all about who you know,” that’s because that is exactly what I’m saying. You can rail about how unfair that is, and how it makes publishing into an incestuous little club…that’s the way the machine is built, people.

Ever notice how off-putting it is when someone addresses you as “people?”

Wrapped in what at times seem to be obsequy, Bourne exits, busily giving the industry every benefit of every doubt. Tomorrow is another day:

There is a market, however tiny, for good books, and there are a small number of smart, hard-working people who live for the thrill of finding a talented author. If you are one of those talented authors, then it is your job to stop whining and figure out how to make it easy for them to find you.

All of which sets Bourne up as a potential fish in a barrel for author Jurgen Wolff.

While I admire humility, I meet too many writers who take it too far. They act as though an agent would be doing them a favor by representing them and a publisher would be granting an act of generosity by publishing their book.

Pretty much head-on, aren’t they? Bourne and Wolff, collision ahead, get off a flare.

Wolff is the author of, most recently, the business-book-sounding (FT Press, after all) Creativity Now: Get inspired, create ideas and make them happen! in a second edition.

That exclamation point is entirely his, don’t blame me.

Here, he’s at Writer Unboxed a few days ago,  in an essay titled Writers, Let’s Not Wear a “Kick Me” Sign On Our Backs.

I’m not saying that editors and agents aren’t nice people, but they’re not in business to be your friend, they’re in business to make money. If they think you can help them do that, they will work with you. If they don’t, they won’t.

He starts, bless him, by recalling “the old days, when an editor would see a spark of talent in an aspiring novelist and publish his or her book not expecting to make a profit on it but hoping that after five or six books the writer would catch on.”

He goes on, in this light, to invoke Maxwell Perkins:

(He) took on F. Scott Fitzgerald despite the opposition of Perkins’ colleagues at Charles Scribner’s sons. He worked closely with Fitzgerald to get This Side of Paradise into publishable shape and ultimately became a close friend of the talented but alcoholic and chaotic novelist. He had much the same relationship with Ernest Hemingway and, for a time, Thomas Wolfe.

But, of course, quoth the raven, that was then, this is now.

These days it’s all about the money, and not in the long term. …Most editors are even less inclined to take chances… Similarly, agents are interested in clients who will earn enough for fifteen percent of that sum to be worth working for.

You know what this pairing of Bourne and Wolff shows? –how richly incongruous the digital dynamic has made the motivations of various classes within publishing.

As Bourne diligently talks himself into yet another rewrite — “I am seriously thinking about revising the book from beginning to end before I send it out again” — Wolff is just as purposfully trying to straighten the backbones of long-bowed writers:

My point is that you and the agent or you and the publisher are business partners. Equal business partners.

And both men are right. Both men are right.

Yes, Bourne, writers need to get these heavy chips off their shoulders and listen to the expertise coming back to them from The Rejectors. And yes, Wolff, writers also need to expect respect and stand up as if they know their years of effort have earned it.

I especially like Wolff’s rejection of silence as “the new ‘no'”:

Agents and producers who are willing to look at unsolicited material (should) have the courtesy to let writers know when they are not interested in something offered to them, rather than just not answering.

I’ve lived in cultures in Europe the collective temperaments of which make silence the equivalent of “no.”

This works no better for those good people than it does in publishing, in which some have decided to announce that no answer means they’re not interested.

It actually can appear to be evasive.

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As Wolff writes:

I’m not suggesting they owe writers a critique or anything more than a simple, “Thank you, but this does not meet our needs at the present time.” …How long would it take to have a secretary send that message via an email?

Look, Jurgen has publishing people’s backs, too. If things went as they should, he writes:

Writers would not ask agents or publishers for personal advice, loans, or make “my dog ate my homework” type excuses for missing deadlines. Yes, talk to any agent and you’ll find out all of these happen.

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But he’s not afraid to make what may be the most justifiable run at publishers available in good conscience today — and yet, oddly, the one we hear the least about:

Agents and publishers (should) recognize that we are in this together and reflect in their royalties, especially for ebooks, that more of the burden of marketing falls upon the writer than ever before.

I started by liking neither essay. Bourne was too self-effacing on the part of the writing sector, I felt, and Wolff was too demanding.

But in that strange way the digital dynamic has these days of mucking things up just enough to keep you off-balance — beneficially — I realized that, taken together, these two fellows had written up a kind of portrait of our tired, bewildered community.

“Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny,” GBS had Jack Tanner tell us in The Revolutionist’s Handbook that follows Man and Superman. “They have only shifted it to another shoulder.”

And when you consider Bourne struggling to own his failures, then look at Wolff exhorting us all to take responsibility for ourselves, you realize what a dangerous bog of a business we’re crossing. And why two heads are better than one.

Taken together, maybe we can manage to look a little less selfish than we all must feel at times these days.

As Wolff writes:

Respect should be expected and delivered in both directions.

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Social Media: Verification at last / Friedman

Here, on the 52nd consecutive weekly gassing of the Ether, I’m pleased to make sure you’re aware that our Jane Friedman — she of the 160,300+ followers — has been suddenly and rightly “verified” by Twitter Almighty.

Couldn’t happen to a better person.

I am beyond green. I am the color of absinthe with envy.

And an update from England:

Just as the Ether gasses into the light of day. Sam Missingham of TheBookseller and TheFutureBook tells us that TheBookseller has been verified, as well.

Congratulations on both sides of the Pond.

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Authors: Remember Amanda Hocking? / Cook

I was working full-time in a group home…I think it was like 3 to 9, or 2 to 10 p.m….and when I came home, at the time we didn’t have cable or Internet because we couldn’t afford it. So that was like an amazing thing, like a miracle, because I could never get distracted. I had to sit down and write because there was nothing on at 10 o’clock at night…I would write all night long…I’d sleep for probably four or five hours, and then I’d get up and do it again.

Two years ago this month — and speaking of Twitter-verified luminaries — Amanda Hocking tells entertainment journalist (and longtime pal of mine) Shanon Cook, she started writing full-time. “That was about six months after I started publishing.”

Here is a brand-new, handsomely crafted (with timed still shots) 24-minute Meet the Author podcast from iTunes — followed by Nicola Barber’s reading of Chapter 1 of Wake. It was recorded last week at the SoHo Apple Store with an audience.

And both Cook and some of the audience members have good questions for her, including a lot of how-did-you-do-it? queries, the stuff those Amazonian dreams are made on.

Cook puts the “Dawson’s 32 Million Active Titles Question” to Hocking, asking “How on Earth is it possible to stand out (as Hocking did, in selling more than a million ebooks) with that kind of competition?

As usual, Hocking is quite straigthtforward in talking about her approach.

I’ve tried to come up with some sort of magic answer — aha, this one thing. But I think it was really a combination of things:

• I was writing a popular genre;
• I had a number of books that I could publish on-hand, so I put out a lot of books in a short amount of time;
• I priced them very low;
• And I was very present on the Internet, so I was actively talking to readers or book bloggers, that kind of thing.
• And then some other magical element where stars align and angels sing and that kind of thing just played into it, too.

Hocking still writes at night. Like some of her vampire characters, she’s a devoted night creature, sleeps dayside, and writes a book “in two to four weeks” in marathon stints of 10 hours or more at a time.

She talks about outlining as being a major help in her work. “Outlining helps you never put the (writer’s) block in the way.”

If you take away the distractions and put somebody in front of a computer long enough, they’ll write something.

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I’ll allow the critic in me to make one comment here. Hocking — whose openness about her career has  always been admirable — starts the session with Cook by reading the first page of the prologue of Wake, her new book from St. Martin’s Griffin.

As it turns out, Hocking shares a serious problem with many authors — she can’t give a good public reading of her own work.

For many writers, it takes training to learn the kind of delivery they need at a podium.

The “reading voice” is different from that of a daily speaking voice.

And putting your work across in a reading calls for skills largely untouched in the writing process, itself.

So there’s no reason for a writer to feel bad if she or he isn’t a natural in front of a crowd ready to hear the work read aloud. But it is a problem that that needs specialized, dedicated work to overcome.

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Just spent 3 minutes complimenting a lass on her handwashing skills in the restroom. Clearly a slow news day.

— Shanon Cook (@ShanonCook) August 22, 2012

 

Copyright: Or Creditright? / Jarvis

Don’t we in this world — the Blogger/Twitter/Medium (read: Ev’s) universe — want our stuff to be shared, carried along on a wave of recommendation, comment, addition, and argument? We just want credit. That’s what needs protection.

“Ev” is Evan Williams of Twitter-founding fame. And our commentary writer here is Jeff Jarvis in the first of a two-parter.

The first section — Copyright or creators’ rights? — is on “Ev’s” new Medium site.

The second — Copyright v creditright — is on Jarvis’ own blog site, a continuation and fleshing out of his concept.

Salient points:

• Content is not king. The assumption that content contains all our value in media leads us to sell it and prevent others from copying it, true — but it also leads to missing opportunities, such as realizing the value in relationships.
• If relationships have value, then creators want to assure connections to people through links and data: “Who read or commented on or shared my idea and what can we do together?”
• This notion does not kill advertising support for creation. But it says that revenue should travel with content as it is shared.

How practical Jarvis’ ideas in this regard may be is up for debate. But as perplexing as the copyright issue has become on the digital tide, a re-envisioning of what rights creators actually need is worth some thought.

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Craft: More Best-Seller Lists / Ferriss

If you’ve ever wondered like me what a pure listing of all new hardcovers would look like, regardless of subject matter, the below list provided to me by Amazon — which I’ll call the “Amazon Monthly 100″ — is probably the closest you’ll ever get.

Normally more decorative than useful, Amazon author Tim Ferriss has put some time, maybe not four hours, into a post headlined How Bestseller Lists Work…and Introducing the Amazon Monthly 100.

His The 4-Hour Chef is set for a November release, so he’ll need to cook up some best-seller results there, probably on his mind.

I don’t think I have wondered, really, what that “pure listing of all new hardcovers would look like.”

But one part of the rationale on this is good — the monthly element of the promised list should, as Ferriss writes, “remove all one-week wonders and most pay-for-play (buying your own books to hit the list).”

Not as interesting as the new DBW ebooks list, Ferriss’ write does have some information on several other major lists. And he bemoans in bold fonts, the fact that “the Times refuses to track eBook sales for all this “lesser” non-fiction!”

Exclamation point his, of course.

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Craft: More Copyright / Frazer

“I copyrighted this DVD by mailing it to myself.”

Yeah, not so much.

And while copyright issues for authors may not be the sexiest topic — hold your breath for Ferriss’ 4-Hour Copyright Expert — Brad Frazer knows this:

There is one very important “gotcha” that can arise from not timely registering one’s copyrights. In the United States, if you do not register your copyright in a work within three months of the date of first publication of that work, you will not be able to recover either your attorney’s fees or a special category of money called “statutory damages” in a subsequent copyright infringement lawsuit—even if you win.

In Copyright is Not a Verb, a guest post for the verified Jane Friedman, Frazer wades into a big area of confusion for many writers these days — some of whom have heard myths about how to copyright a work, and others have heard that copyrighting is a thing of the past, forget it, don’t worry.

So, should a writer copyright an unpublished work before submitting it?… The answer depends on whether the author wishes to have a remedy to enforce her copyrights through a copyright infringement lawsuit in the event her work is copied or distributed unlawfully and her copyright is thus infringed.

Frazer’s write has several nice party-chat nuggets for you, too. For example, that little “c” in a circle? Means nothing about whether the copyright has been registered.

And titles, you know, “aren’t protectable in copyright”:

You may call your book “JAWS” without infringing on Peter Benchley’s copyrights, assuming you did not otherwise plagiarize Mr. Benchley’s words.

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Craft: Exercising Your Muse / Ross

So I returned this morning, once again, to my writing routine. And, lo and behold, I felt enough of a creative rush to write this post, my first to this site in two weeks. I am a slow learner, but if I keep calling myself out publicly on these setbacks, maybe the lesson will sink in. A daily workout with my muse is not an indulgence, but an investment.

There are three ideas here, really, in Patrick Ross’ write — Is Your Creative Muse Getting Regular Exercise?

And I’m interested in what works for you — this stuff is all over the map, depending who you talk to.

• Idea #1 — has to be early morning.
• Idea #2 — has to be physical exercise.
• Idea #3 — has to be mental exercise (as in writing before dawn).

So what is it for you? Ross is saying that while the morning workout may not be his routine, the morning write is, when he’s on his game.

Yes? No? Huh?

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Books: Reading on the Ether

For an updated list of planned confabs, please see the Publishing Conferences page at PorterAnderson.com. There, you’ll note that the upcoming F+W Media conferences now have extended Early Bird rates into mid-August — it’s not too late, after all, to get the best prices.

The books you see here have been referenced recently in Writing on the Ether.

I’m bringing them together in one spot each week, to help you recall and locate them, not as an endorsement.

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Writing on the Ether Sponsors:

• My Call to the Ring: A Memoir of a Girl Who Yearns to Box by Deirdre Gogarty with Darrelyn Saloom (Glasnevin)
• My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris (Red Season)
• Prophecy, An ARKANE Thriller by J.F. Penn (The Creative Penn)
  
• The Prodigal Hour by Will Entrekin (Exciting Press)
• Perfect Skin by Nick Earls (Exciting Press)
• Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing by L.L. Barkat (T.S. Poetry Press)

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• American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson
• Apocalypsis by Mario Giordano and Bastei Lübbe
• The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis
• Chasing Sylvia Beach by Cynthia Morris
• Creativity Now by Jurgen Wolff
• Dana Andrews: Hollywood Enigma by Carl Rollyson
• A Dyeing Shame by Elizabeth Spann Craig
• I Ate the Sheriff by K. Bennett
• Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe by Nathan Bransford
• The Khmer Kill by Barry Eisler
• Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend by Carl Rollyson
• Pablo Picasso: A Biography for Beginners by Carl Rollyson
• The Publishing Business by Kelvin Smith
• The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross
• Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield
• Veniss Underground by Jeff Vandermeer
• Wake by Amanda Hocking

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I am just going to point out that "journalism" without objectivity and fact checking = marketing.

— Brett Sandusky (@bsandusky) August 22, 2012

Last Gas: Franck in Her Own Right / Phillips

Over the past week, it’s been maddening to see that so much of the writing in her memory has positioned her in relationship to her husband. Headlines announce the passing of the legend’s wife, and quotes de-emphasize the importance of her own photography.

As if in answer to the old “that’s no lady, that’s my wife” line, Mangum Photos editor Kate Phillips honors the late Martine Franck (1938-2012) as An Introvert’s Photographer at Slate — and as very much her own person.

When one is married to one of the most famous photographers in history (Henri Cartier-Bresson), she risks being pigeonholed as her “husband’s wife.” Belgian photographer Martine Franck, who died last week at 74, was an unusual artist, deserving of recognition for her own unique visual and personal strengths.

Franck — a member of Magnum, herself, from 1980, and a co-founder of Paris’ Viva agency — had a special relationship with Ariane Mnouchkine and her Theatre du Soleil theater company. She became the company’s official photographer, placing herself at the very center of the sheer force that French performance art spun around itself in the middle of the last century.

Phillips writes:

She didn’t photograph war or famine. Her greatest work took as its subject the intellectual landscape of humanity. Her photographs evoke a sense of serenity and an eye for design in the world around her. Martine found architecture in the landscape, both built and natural.

Among my favorite Franck photos (and I’m hardly alone in loving this image) is her famous study of a pool designed by Alain Capeilleres in Le Brusc, Provence.

The lines of the tiles force a perspective lesson tightly contested by stark, clean shadow-play, a body, a hammock, a serpentine grassy berm.

There’s some good commentary on this work, in particular, in Marco Werman’s interview with Magnum’s Susan Meiselas, Remembering Celebrated Photographer Martine Franck from PRI’s The World.

Rather than show it to you here, I’m mindful of the great work Magnum has done in protecting its artists’ property.

So I’ll tempt you with a small look at it on the cover of Franck’s 2005 monograph, One Day to the Next, and direct you to this excellent look at the piece — and a grand portfolio of Franck’s work — at the Magnum site, itself.

Franck traveled to New York for the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century in 2010, the same year she released Women/Femmes and was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, notes Amanda Hopkinson in her Martine Franck obituary for the Guardian.

As Mark Bussell related in his piece on her that year for the Times, Martine Franck’s Pictures Within Pictures, she followed the MoMA trip with a journey to India to photograph women’s support groups.

Phillips writes:

For me personally, Martine was an introvert’s photographer—a role model for those of us who find strength in quiet observation. A couple of days before her death, I read a quote by Martine that hit home for me: “I was very ill at ease with people in social situations, and I realized that if I photographed I wouldn’t have to chat.

And, Phillips reveals, she had been engaged with Franck on a collection of her work, some of which you can see on the Slate site in a gallery there.

I wanted to do her proud with a comprehensive edit of her work and my initial attempt at a slide show yielded 468 “finalists” that I wish I could share. Instead, I’m giving you a hint of that creativity-filled dinner party and hope that you’ll raise a glass in Martine’s memory.

That man wasn’t Henri Cartier-Bresson.

He was Martine Franck’s husband.

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"Today's Pictures" remembers Martine Franck — her life, her work and her unique personality–>http://t.co/B6rUt924 #HCB @Slate

— Magnum Photos (@MagnumPhotos) August 22, 2012

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My Call to the Ring: A Memoir of a Girl Who Yearns to Box

by Deirdre Gogarty & Darrelyn Saloom
In the 1980s, boxing is illegal for women in Ireland. But Deirdre Gogarty has only one dream: to be the first Irish woman to win a world boxing title. How can a shy, young misfit become a professional boxer in a country that bans women from the sport? Gogarty follows her calling to compete and journeys from the Irish Sea to the Gulf of Mexico, from outcast to center ring, from the depths of depression to the championship fight of her life.

“If you’ve ever wondered why and how people do extraordinary, almost impossible things, read My Call to the Ring. Deirdre Gogarty knocked me out with this book.”

—Ted Mann, former National Lampoon editor, television writer and producer

Find out more on Amazon and download a sample to your Kindle.

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Main images: iStockphoto / Paha_L and giac