2007 writers market editor photo robert lee brewer the idea girl says linda randall

2007 writers market editor robert lee brewer assistant editor joanna masterson the idea girl says linda randall

Monday – Research Day – Three Books – Speed Reading – Writing

I finally finished reading The New Writers Handbook 2007 and 2007 Writers Market. Writing Romance, I put away, it doesn’t apply to me. I actually got it for the CD in the book and when I popped it in, it was blank?

I started blogging last week about the first book, and created several videos about it, posting them on my ideagirlconsulting youtube channel.

In total I created 28 videos about the things that I blog about on two of my sites.

I will be adding to that list sometime next week.

I have a list of notes to go over before I create my thesis on what I’ve learned this week.

Remember the other day, when I told you to write down the names and genres?

Well today, I went through the list of 50 Literary Agents in 2007 Writer’s Market and I found around 14 agents for Women’s and Chick Lit Fiction.

One of the things I noticed were the Stats.

If they list new/unpublished authors under 10%, I didn’t even bother to write it down.

That is the equivalent of 1 manuscript.

Like I want to compete with 20,000 people, I don’t think so!

I’m looking for a Literary Agent, that want nothing but Fiction!

Next I’m going to look at what they are “ACTIVELY SEARCHING FOR:”

Now this book is from 2007, and the markets do change.

So I will have to take a look at each agents website to see what they are “ACTIVELY SEARCHING/SEEKING.”

This will improve your chances of someone looking at your manuscript.

Let’s say they are “ACTIVELY SEARCHING/SEEKING ROMANCE, CHICK LIT” then I’m going to want to submit my chick lit manuscript The Calamity Girl – The Promotion.

Next you HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION to the submission guidelines.

Although I did find some confusing.

So again, we go to the Literary Agents website and see exactly what they want.

Is it a Query?

A 3 page synopsis and a Query with SASE?

Note, most refuse Email and Fax inquiries, so guess what?

DON’T SEND A QUERY BY EMAIL OR BY FAX.

It will go straight into the garbage bin.

You know WHY I’m putting some of this stuff in CAPS?

To draw your attention, because ALAS, hundreds of you lovely writers are EMAILING and FAXING!

Tsk, tsk, it shouldn’t be.

Let’s all read the fine print before we Query our Literary Agent.

If it states, NO ROMANCE, we will not send a manuscript that is romantic.

Why?

Because it will have an immediate meeting with the garbage bin.

You have wasted your time, money, the post workers time (they have to walk , delivery your letter, yadda yadda) and angered another Literary Agent, that is overloaded already and probably will blow up at someone who walks through their door because they received yet another stupid email.

Okay so i’m being blunt, but I can sympathize with them.

My time is precious and I like to do my work in an organized fashion.

Let’s say I give myself 4 hours to read manuscripts, an hour for emails and a few hours for correspondence and phone calls.

I wasted about 1/2 an hour looking at emails (Queries) from writers who failed to read my instructions on my website.

This might put me in a bad mood, or it will give me LESS time to read manuscripts that are submitted with everything that is required.

Let’s make our Literary Agent’s jobs much easier.

Follow those instructions and show them some kindness along the way.

ps

I am not a Literary Agent. This is a fictional story about what I think I would do if I was a Literary Agent.

As some of you may know I’m a bit of a writer. I already have two WIPs (works in progress) that are complete and awaiting various editing phases. I also have a plethora of works in progress that are on going at the moment but I want to talk about Publish America (aka PA).

I’m part of a writing forum called AW (Absolute Writer) and the consensus there, despite PA’s claims, is that PA is a pay to play publisher – more accurately it’s a vanity publisher and a bad one. They’ve been sued several times by people who have been scammed by them from what I understand. If you look around, even the BBB in Maryland (where they operate) has many complaints about them.

Maryland BBB

To Quote the BBB:

Based on BBB files, this business has a BBB Rating of F on a scale from A+ to F.

Reasons for this rating include:
Failure to honor commitment to arbitrate or mediate disputes.
103 complaints filed against business
2 complaints filed against business that were not resolved.

And:

BBB processed a total of 103 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period. Of the total of 103 complaints closed in 36 months, 63 were closed in the last year.

These complaints concerned :
7 regarding Billing or Collection Issues
49 regarding Contract Issues
10 regarding Customer Service Issues
13 regarding Delivery Issues
8 regarding Product Issues
2 regarding Refund or Exchange Issues
3 regarding Sales Practice Issues
11 regarding Service Issues

These complaints were closed as:
57 Resolved
2 Unresolved
44 Administratively Closed

Then the owner or supposed owner of PA (current) Miranda Prather has this in the Wiki files about her:

Miranda Prather is an American woman who gained national attention in July 1997 after police arrested her for faking a hate crime. A lesbian, Prather was a graduate assistant and president of the campus gay and lesbian support group at Eastern New Mexico University.

Is this seriously a company that any author wants to get involved with? They are worse than a vanity, pay to play publisher. They treat their “authors” like customers and their customers like crap. There is no level they don’t seem to stoop to in the way they treat people. It’s pretty amazingly disheartening to watch authors be treated to “Nonsense, stop the crap” when asking for simple feedback on a question in the PA forums and in email. They have consistently sold their authors their own books, degraded the level of quality compared to pricing of those books and have even claimed they put their books on the shelf in the past but never delivered.

They hold your book “ransom” for 7 years, rarely ever releasing it before hand at request of the author. I know it’s hard to get an agent, to get a publisher. It can be infuriatingly frustrating but I promise you this – PA isn’t looking for your work except to exploit it and you as an author. Please don’t get taken in by these alleged scam artists. It’s not worth the heartache or the headache. Value yourself, your work and the time and effort you’ve put into it. Rejections from real publishers and agents are not personal, they are just the journey to the ultimate goal – being legitimately published.

Did you notice this in today’s Publisher’s Lunch?

Melanie Kroupa will serve as editor at large at Marshall Cavendish, reporting to publisher Margery Cuyler, starting January 1. Kroupa ran an eponymous imprint for Farrar, Straus Children’s until it was closed about a year ago. She will acquire and edit approximately six books a year, while also continuing to edit a “select number of titles” for others out of her office in Dedham, MA. Authors Kroupa has worked with include this year’s National Book Award winner for Claudette Colvin, Phillip Hoose.

It may have been a merry Christmas for many folks, but it’s doubtful that bookstores and publishers found much holiday cheer. The recession has caused many Americans to tighten their belts and one of the things they are doing is buying fewer books and cheaper books, according to Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer service.

The survey found that 34 percent of Americans who buy books are buying fewer books and 19 percent are buying more used books or doing book trades. I know I’m buying more used books, though I do it because I’m looking for older books and autographed ones. Still, it probably has reduced the number of new books I’m buying.

The survey also indicated that books buyers are looking for ways to reduce the cost of the books they do buy. This includes waiting for paperback editions of books rather than purchasing the more-expensive hardcover or buying electronic books. Some people are focusing their hardback purchase on those that are deeply discounted, such as the Wal-Mart $9 bestsellers.

It’s sad news to hear. The publishing industry is struggling. For this country to continue to be literate, authors and publishers are going to have to become much more innovative in their marketing and content selection to keep attracting readers.

Check out the Best of 2009 from a number of different sources!  Here’s to even more reading in 2010!

USA Today 10 More Books We Loved Reading in 2009

Spooner- Pete Dexter

Stitches – David Small

Under the Dome – Stephen King

Triangular Road - Paule Marshall

Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann

Losing Mum and Pup – Christopher Buckley

Dorethea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits – Linda Gordon

Revelation – CJ Sansom

How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood – William Mann

People Magazine

Open by Andre Agassi

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Somewhere Towards an End by Diana Athill

Under the Dome by Stephen King

The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

People Magazine Readers

The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown

The Shack – William P Young

The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffennegger

The Associate – John Grisham

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society – Mary Ann Shaffer

The Help – Kathryn Stockett

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo – Stieg Larson

The Host – Stephanie Meyer

Olive Kittredge – Elizabeth Stout

2009 Man Booker Prize Winner

Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel

Publishers Weekly Top 10

Cheever: A Life – Blake Bailey (Knopf)

Await Your Reply – Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon - Neil Sheehan (Random House)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders - Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Big Machine – Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science -Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Stitches – David Small (Norton)

Shop Class as Soulcraft -Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi -Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon – David Grann (Doubleday)

The Scarecrow -Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

The Fate of Katherine Carr -Thomas H. Cook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Spooner -Pete Dexter (Grand Central)

Dark Places -Gillian Flynn (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Man in the Wooden Hat-Jane Gardam (Europa)

Ravens – George Dawes Green (Grand Central)

Tinkers – Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press)

The Believers – Zoë Heller (Harper)

The Vagrants – Yiyun Li (Random)

How to Sell – Clancy Martin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

New World Monkeys – Nancy Mauro (Crown/Shaye Areheart)

The Last War -Ana Menendez (Harper)

Nemesis – Jo Nesbø (Harper)

Lark and Termite – Jayne Anne Phillips (Pantheon)

The Cry of the Sloth – Sam Savage (Coffee House)

Drood – Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)

Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese (Knopf)

The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters (Riverhead)

Sag Harbor – Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Once the Shore – Paul Yoon (Sarabande)

Amazon Top 10 of 2009:

Good Reads Top 10

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett (Goodreads author)

Catching Fire
by Suzanne Collins

City of Glass
by Cassandra Clare 213 people voted »

Blood Promise
by Richelle Mead

Evermore
by Alyson Noel (Goodreads author)

The Last Olympian
by Rick Riordan, Jesse Bernstein (Narrator)

Hunted
by P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast

Dead and Gone
by Charlaine Harris

Blue Moon
by Alyson Noel

Cutting for Stone
by Abraham Verghese

Maureen Corrigan from NPR

Fiction

• The Believers, by Zoe Heller, hardcover, 352 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99
• Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin, hardcover, 262 pages, Scribner, list price: $25
• A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore, hardcover, 336 pages, Knopf, list price: $25.95
• The Man in the Wooden Hat, by Jane Gardam, paperback, 240 pages, Europa, list price: $15
• The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter, hardcover, 304 pages, Harper, list price: $25.99

Non-Fiction

• Happens Every Day: An All-Too-True Story, by Isabel Gillies, hardcover, 272 pages, Scribner, list price: $25
• The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, by Kirstin Downey, hardcover, 480 pages, Nan A. Talese, list price: $35
• Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin, hardcover, 432 pages, Metropolitan, list price $27.50
• Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein, hardcover, 624 pags, W.W. Norton & Co., list price: $29.95

San Francisco Chronicle Ten Bests

Fiction

All the Living, by C.E. Morgan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 199 pages; $23).

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster; 243 pages; $25).

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon; 344 pages; $29.95).

Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James (Knopf; 336 pages; $24.95).

The Believers, by Zoë Heller (Harper; 335 pages; $25.99).

Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press; 339 pages; $24).

Blonde Roots, by Bernardine Evaristo (Riverhead; 269 pages; $24.95).

The Book of Genesis, illustrated by R. Crumb (Norton; 224 pages; $24.95).

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Scribner; 262 pages; $25).

The Children’s Book, by A.S. Byatt (Knopf; 675 pages; $26.95).

Non Fiction

Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 567 pages; $35).

The Bolter, by Frances Osborne (Knopf; 300 pages; $30).

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan; 235 pages; $23).

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, by Tad Friend (Little, Brown; 353 pages; $24.99).

Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey (Knopf; 770 pages; $35).

Closing Time: A Memoir, by Joe Queenan (Viking; 338 pages; $26.95).

Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker, by James McManus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 516 pages; $30).

Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein (Norton; 598 pages; $29.95).

Dawn Light: Dancing With Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day, by Diane Ackerman (Norton; 240 pages; $24.95).

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, by Linda Gordon (Norton; 536 pages; $35).

2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

Slate Magazine’s Best of 2009

Michael Agger, senior editor
John Updike’s Endpoint is a final burst of fluency from the New England master. Who else could spin a charming poem out of a trip to Best Buy to buy a new computer? “Brave world! The geeks in matching shirts/ talked gigabytes to girls with blue tattoos.” Updike’s lyric gift carried him to the end. His words meet death both obliquely and directly. Read this book late in the evening, with a stiff drink by your side. Then marvel at Updike’s metaphors, like the one about Payne Stewart’s swing: “its aftermath shimmered in the air: dragonfly wings.” Or at his cold-palmed observations, as when studying the departure gate for Florida: “Now, agèd, average, dullish, lame, and halt/ we claim our due, our fun doom in the sun.” And at his gentle knocks on your soul: “Birthday, death day—what day is not both?”

Emily Bazelon, senior editor and DoubleX co-editor
In A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert tells a set of interlocking stories about the women who populate the branch of one family tree, moving from a British suffragette of the 19^th century to her contemporary descendants in Manhattan and Delaware. Grandmothers and mothers pass along more damage than wisdom, and Walbert shows us how this stunts the growth of their daughters and granddaughters. The prose is spare; Walbert, who was my fiction teacher in college, at moments reminds me of another master stylist, Marilynne Robinson. In the end, the novel adds up to more than the sum of its chapters because of its historical arc and its images. The suffragette starves herself as a political statement, and when her young daughter crawls into bed with her at the end, it’s a death made senseless.

Christopher Beam, political reporter
President Obama’s decision to double down on the war in Afghanistan invites comparisons to the last surge—the influx of more than 20,000 troops to Iraq in 2007—which David Finkel recounts from the perspective of one battalion in The Good Soldiers. The commander of this east Baghdad force, Ralph Kauzlarich, tackles the mission with relentless optimism: “It’s all good,” he repeats, as everything goes from not-good to less so. Even when the war’s stats improve—fewer attacks, fewer American and Iraqi deaths—morale deteriorates. IEDs litter the roads. Rockets and homemade bombs rain down on the base. Successes, like killing an Iraqi who detonated a roadside bomb, scar the soldiers as much as their failures. Finkel cuts back and forth between Washington and Baghdad, Congressional hearing and Humvee on fire. The reality gap is astonishing. Soldiers marvel at the certainty of American politicians and analysts, both for and against the war. After watching friends die, what begins as an earnest refrain—”Good thing we’re winning”—by the end becomes a punchline. (Fred Kaplan, Slate’s “War Stories” columnist, seconds this selection.)

Christopher Benfey, art critic
I took Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi to the beach last summer and didn’t want it or the trip to end. It felt like the perfect vacation book, a novel about a hack writer’s working holiday that ends more or less the way Gustav von Aschenbach’s does in Death in Venice. The Venice half of the book is deliriously funny, sexy, and deft—the international art world is skewered perfectly. The India section is a perfect counterweight, spiritual and profound. When I finished Dyer’s book, I wanted to prolong the pleasure, so I went back and reread Mann’s novella. It was much funnier than I’d remembered, with sentences here and there that I could have sworn Dyer himself had inserted.

Sara Dickerman, contributor
With Chronic City, genre mix-master Jonathan Lethem takes the stuffiness out of a Manhattan society novel by overlaying it with dystopian fantasy. An unending winter has descended over a parallel New York. A former child star, whose astronaut fiancé is marooned in outer space, befriends an agoraphobic retired street philosopher amid a skunky cloud of pot smoke. A mysterious creature (or is it a machine?) is destroying entire city blocks with each sporadic attack. Needless to say, conspiracies emerge. There’s something a little gaudy about Lethem’s huge cast of characters—the gazillionaire mayor, the heiress, the misanthropic artist—but thanks to his impossibly vigorous language, I couldn’t get enough. And for all the roiling plot and characters, the book is surprisingly tender, a knotty skein of city nostalgia and improbable alliances.

Jessica Grose, managing editor of DoubleX
The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr’s first memoir about her unfortunate childhood in East Texas, was about such a singular experience—how many other women can say their mamas tried to kill them with a butcher knife?—that I wondered whether she had used up all her best material. Though her most recent memoir, Lit, is about the more common trials of alcoholism, divorce and spiritual discovery, it is just as compelling, and beautifully written, as that first effort. Following Karr’s rise from unpublished, drunk poet to sober, Godly literary darling is the funniest damn thing—even her forays into the institution (“the mental Marriott,” in Karr’s parlance) are a riot, and the humor never seems forced. But it’s not all a cynical yuk-fest. Though the self-proclaimed “habitually morbid bitch” may not want to admit it, the pleasure of reading Lit is a very earnest one.

Johann Hari, contributor
To my surprise, the books I most adored this year all belonged to a genre that is often dismissed as old-fashioned: the collection of essays. Wallace Shawn’s—titled simply Essays—are elegant and nimble and leave you feeling as if you have been disemboweled. He picks apart how, simply by living our lives as nice people in a Western society, we are complicit in atrocities towards the world’s poor, and we choose not to see it. With a sweet smile, he rips up all our self-justifying delusions, and shows us what we have become.

George Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For? is a beautiful exploration of how to be a left-wing intellectual without becoming despairing or delusional or a sell-out. It is a little bag of polished polemical diamonds. Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind is a gorgeous grab bag of essays that restores to literary criticism a quality that has been drowned out for too long by irony and postmodernism and willful obscurity—moral passion. I loved them all.

Nathan Heller, copy editor
John Cheever was underappreciated through most of his career and tends, in death, to be too swiftly pigeon-holed. Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (which I reviewed earlier this year) sets both scores straight. This carefully researched biography highlights the author’s constant innovations on the page and chronic restiveness in life, drawing out the intricate dynamic between the two. Fortunately for Bailey, Cheever was as eloquent in private correspondence as in published work, and the book is rich with its subject’s wry, bawdy voice. (“I’m afraid I was a nuisance about money,” Cheever once wrote an editor, “but I have this nightmare where I push a super-market wagon across River Street—macaroni and cold cuts—and am either run down by Roth in his Daimler or buzzed by Updike in a new flying machine.”) The result is an unusual thing—a careful and humane biography that’s as rollicking and irresistible as a beach read.

Ann Hulbert, books editor
Don’t be fooled by the reflexive comparison of Alice Munro with Chekhov. Her most recent collection of stories, Too Much Happiness, will take you into Flannery O’Connor terrain. Trapped in her kitchen by a garrulous murderer, a widow spins a cathartic story. A young mother, her world blasted apart by a gruesome event, stumbles forward alone. A mysterious new arrival in a London, Ontario, rooming house lures a fellow student into dark recesses of humiliation. A son goes missing and resurfaces in a baffling guise. A childhood crime against a girl—mentally challenged, and loathed for no reason other than “the way she could disturb your innards and make you sick of your life”—goes unconfessed but haunts two women. In this gothic realm, the grace is in the artlessly artful prose, which disturbs your innards and your map of life.

Juliet Lapidos, associate editor
If you’re in the market for new ways to abuse your friends and family this holiday season, you might try reading Wells Tower’s excellent debut story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. In the title story, marauding Vikings hang monks from trees and subject a priest to a grotesque ritual called the “blood eagle.” (For details, see my full review.) At least these punishments are relatively swift—the modern American characters, who populate the rest of the stories, like their torture long and psychological. Take Matthew, the narrator of “Retreat” who invites his brother, Stephen, to Maine for a hunting trip, then antagonizes him compulsively. He’s late for the airport pickup, pressures Stephen into spending his life savings on an ill-advised real estate venture, and farts audibly when Stephen tries to communicate his sense of loneliness. Tower’s characters treat their loved ones exactly as badly as they treat themselves. It’s like the golden rule. Perfect for Christmastime.

Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor
The most important legal book I read this year was Karen Greenberg’s The Least Worst Place, about the first 100 days at Guantanamo. It’s a detailed look at an unmined sliver of history: the very first decisions taken about the camp detainees. As it turns out, career officers tried to implement humane policies, only to be thwarted by Bush administration officials. While we tend to think of the disaster that is Guantanamo as an inevitability, Greenberg provides a taxonomy of what went wrong and shows us that it could all have come out very differently.

Noreen Malone, copy editor
Quiet Midwestern girls such as myself rarely get to play the literary muse. Perhaps it’s because, as Lorrie Moore writes in her novel A Gate at the Stairs, we have a tendency to respond to any situation with such thrilling utterances as “sounds good,” whether it does or not. (“It appeared to clinch a deal, and was meant to sound the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except it was promiseless—mere affirmative description.”) But Moore skillfully excavates beneath the outwardly unremarkable, “sounds good” surface of her heroine, 20-year-old farm girl Tassie Keltjin—to thrilling effect. Tassie works in her college town as a nanny to a sophisticated couple that’s adopted a biracial child, she in turn excavating beneath the surface of their marriage. Critics have faulted the plot for veering off the rails in the last third of the novel, when the aftermath of 9/11 looms large in some all-too-convenient ways. They’re not wrong. But Moore’s writing is so lucid and witty and absorbing that you’ll barely notice.

Troy Patterson, television critic
Appearing five months after the writer’s death and clocking in at 1,200-odd pages, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard thus resembles a commemorative slab or a gravestone. Its scale is appropriate to Ballard’s career-long engrossment in impossibly steep heights, dreadfully vast distances, and terrible immensity. One early story, “The Concentration City,” opens with snatches of conversation overheard on Millionth Street in an infinitely extending town—a kind of nightmare omnipolis from which its hero cannot escape. In “The Drowned Giant,” which deserves a place in any anthology of 20^th-century stories, the corpse of a colossus washes up on a beach to be prodded at, scrambled over, and finally picked clean of its flesh. Rendered with a surgeon’s cool precision, lit by a mad scientist’s visionary passion, these and many of the other 96 stories are vertiginously tall tales.

Robert Pinsky, poetry editor
Jim Powell’s Substrate has an eloquent, precise fury that may surprise readers skeptical about contemporary poetry. I suggest that such readers begin with the book’s final, title section, a history of the colonization and development of California through actual, individual lives. I am proud to acknowledge that several of the poems, including the amazing “Two Million Feet of Vinyl,” were first published in Slate. As Powell’s fellow-Californian Frank Bidart says in a blurb, “Powell’s subject is nothing less than how energy and power rise, decay, then reconstitute themselves.” To that subject, Powell brings clarity, passion, a true poet’s ear, and an eye for the natural world and social realities—both perceived with a sharp awareness of violence and grace.

David Plotz, editor
It’s easy enough for a novelist to conjure Tudor England: a king (lascivious), a galleon (gold-laden), a feast (meaty, meady), a maiden (rosy), a bodice (ripped). But in all the millions of pages written about the period—in all those Jean Plaidy novels I gobbled up as a boy—there probably wasn’t a single kind word about Thomas Cromwell, the lawyer, minister, and hatchet man who enabled Henry VIII to divorce his wife, marry Anne Boleyn, and break with the Catholic Church. Cromwell is universally loathed in fiction and film, notably as the villainous foil to Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. But the Cromwell of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is the most sympathetic hero I’ve met in years. As he rises from gutter poverty to counsel to Cardinal Wolsey to confidante of Anne and the king, Cromwell is a man of infinite complexity: tolerant, just, loyal, flexible, ruthless, generous, witty, careful, and four steps ahead of the dopey earls and rigid bishops who oppose him. Wolf Hall is pure pleasure to read, a 560-page man crush.

Jack Shafer, “Press Box” columnist
Not just for journalism hounds, John Maxwell Hamilton’s Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting ladles from the last two and a half centuries a detailed history of American reporting from abroad. In the beginning, foreign correspondence was practically that—interesting letters from people living overseas published alongside pieces stolen without attribution from foreign newspapers. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was the first to bring genuine enterprise to the form, coordinating a network of European correspondents in the 1830s to compose timely, insightful dispatches. Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent turned academic, assembles the components of the big foreign-reporting machine—the editors, publishers, reporters, fixers, and shooters as well as technologies such as transoceanic telegraph cables, television, the geosynchronous satellite, the personal computer, and the Internet—to produce an authoritative book. There is nothing like it in the library.

John Swansburg, culture editor
OK, I admit it: In college, I wrote a villanelle about the moon. And I was sort of proud of it. Villanelles are hard. I also once sang happy birthday to A.R. Ammons. Long story. Suffice it to say I came to Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist as something of a lapsed poetry enthusiast, which is a nice way to come to it. The novel is essentially a long, discursive monologue by Paul Chowder, a poet who can’t seem to finish the introduction to an anthology he’s edited. By way of procrastination, he edifies the reader with his theories about why poems don’t rhyme any more, why iambic pentameter isn’t as big a deal as you’ve been led to believe, and why his girlfriend left him. Chowder’s passion for poetry can be wild-eyed, but it’s also infectious—he keeps making you want to put down the novel and run to the nearest volume of Mary Oliver. What keeps you coming back is Chowder himself—a frustrating, self-destructive, utterly amiable man who is impossible not to root for. Finish the book, Paul! Win back the girl!

June Thomas, foreign editor
After wolfing down Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, I have now read as many books about Patricia Highsmith as I have by her—two. And although Schenkar makes the case that her subject wrote “five or six of the more unsettling long fictions of the twentieth century,” I’m content to take her word for it and never make it to three. I would, however, read anything else Schenkar writes. She’s the perfect guide to the life of a disagreeable but dedicated writer—confident, clear, and appropriately judgmental. Patricia Highsmith was a manipulative, exploitative, selfish, self-hating, obsessive, racist, alcoholic anti-Semite who prioritized her work and her definition of success above all else. But by providing the raw material for this wonderful biography, Highsmith did the world a great mitzvah.

Tom Vanderbilt, “Transport” columnist
With Soccernomics, the Financial Times’ indispensible Simon Kuper and top-flight sports economist Stefan Szymanski bring scrupulous economic analysis and statistical rigor to a sport long dependent on hoary—and, it seems, unfounded—assumptions. Just in time for South Africa, Kuper and Szymanski doggedly unpack some of soccer’s (and yes, it OK to call it that, they note; it’s what England called it for most of last century before a fashionable turn toward football) most enduring questions. Most pressingly, why England loses—but also why capital cities fare poorly in European competition, what sorts of players are overpaid (older center-forwards), and the thorny game-theory of penalty kicks (“So Anelka knew that Van Der Sar knew that Anelka knew that Van Der Sar tended to dive right against right footers”). They also fairly demolish an Alexandrian library of sporting clichés—e.g., that the NFL’s socialistic “parity” system makes for a more equitable distribution of champions than England’s free-market Premier League. (It does only by a negligible amount.) Gripping and essential.

Jonah Weiner, pop critic
Bank Notes compiles the work of the country’s highest-paid writers: self-published, anonymous scribes who can command upward of $1,800 a word. They’re bank robbers who pass notes to tellers, forgoing weapons in their holdups. As anthologized by Ken Habarta—who reprints the notes alongside security-camera shots, available details of the robberies, and icons indicating the jobs’ success or failure—these thieves are practitioners of a fascinating, urgent literature. What other writing seeks to do so much in such little space, and with so much at stake? There’s unlikely poetry: “No die,” one note goes, a reference to anti-theft dye-packs that doubles as a chilling threat. (Success.) There’s blunt, utilitarian prose: “Give me a thousand dollars and don’t fuck up.” (Busted.) There’s black comedy: “I have amtrak,” a thief writes, likely meaning anthrax. (I won’t spoil that one.) Some robbers look unremarkable. Others wear painter’s masks or fake moustaches. The information provided is bare-boned, but every page is a gripping mini-drama.

Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group
As a judge of this year’s BBC Samuel Johnson Prize, I spent the first half of the year reading loads of nonfiction. One of our finalists, which I haven’t stopped thinking about, was The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes’ account of the Romantic era’s relationship with science. If, like me, you didn’t study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake. At one level, it is simply an enchanting group biography of the great British discoverers Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and William Herschel, and their relationships with the likes of Keats, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. At another, Holmes’s book is a persuasive plea to heal the pointless breach between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. Reading it made we want to do college over, this time as a history of science major.

Emily Yoffe, “Dear Prudence” and “Human Guinea Pig” columnist
Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, opens in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia. It is a brief era of Czech independence from the usual domination of neighboring countries, and the main characters, a Jewish industrialist and his gentile wife, build a radically modern home made mostly of glass to celebrate the throwing off of the dark, dead past and the welcoming of a world of light and freedom. Then the rest of the 20^th century happens. In this exquisite novel, the vast tragedies that befall the Czech people—Nazism, communism—are told through the successive inhabitants of the house. But the people in glass room often remain opaque to themselves and others. It’s a brilliant stroke by Mawer to have the convulsions of the 20^th century play out in this sparkling house built on optimism. Wait until you finish to read the story of the real house, Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe.

And keep in mind books published this year by Slate staffers and contributors: Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, by Daniel Gross; 1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan; The Great Depression: A Diary, edited by James Ledbetter; The Best Legal Writing 2009, edited by Dahlia Lithwick; Reputation: Portraits in Power, edited by Timothy Noah; Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, by David Plotz; My Two Polish Grandfathers: And Other Essays on the Imaginative Life, by Witold Rybczynski. The F-Word, edited by Jesse Sheidlower; and Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France, by Michael Steinberger.

New York Times  Ten Best Books of 2009

Fiction

BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT – By Maile Meloy

Riverhead Books, $25.95.

CHRONIC CITY -By Jonathan Lethem

Doubleday, $27.95.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS

By Lorrie Moore
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.

HALF BROKE HORSES: A True-Life Novel

By Jeannette Walls
Scribner, $26.

A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN

By Kate Walbert
Scribner, $24.

Nonfiction

THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

By Richard Holmes
Pantheon Books, $40.

THE GOOD SOLDIERS

By David Finkel
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.

LIT: A Memoir

By Mary Karr
Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, $25.99.

LORDS OF FINANCE: The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed
The Penguin Press, $32.95.

RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer’s Life

By Carol Sklenicka
Scribner, $35.

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I have a question for you pertaining to a comic book that I recently purchased titled “TALES FROM THE CRYPT” #20 and whether or not it is a version released in Canada. There’s a maple leaf in the upper left hand corner of the cover and it says it was published by a comic book company called Superior Co. Is that a real company? If so, would you also let me know W-H-E-N it was published, specifically the Y_E_A_R?!!! Thanks Again!

(question has been edited for this blog post)

Superior Publishing was a comics publisher based in Toronto that was active between the years 1947 and 1956.

Superior Comics are usually distinguishable by the blue Maple Leaf in a circle logo - such as the one seen on this Superior Comics edition of Ellery Queen #1 from 1949.

After WWII, the Liberal government re-introduced an import ban that included US comics. Canadian comics publishers were allowed to reprint and repackage US comics, and this lead to a boom in Canadian comics publishing as many companies sought the reprint rights to popular US comics (instead of creating original ones). Superior was the leading company at the time to do this, but unlike their counterparts, they also published original comics as well.

Superior acquired the rights to repackage EC Comics in 1949. Although the import ban was eliminated in 1951 (and American comics flooded over the border again to the delight of many – forcing many Canadian companies that were only reprinting US comics to close), Superior continued to reprint and repackage many US titles – including EC titles — until the mid-1950’s.

By 1955, the anti-horror comics sentiment had spread far and wide in North America, and Superior ceased production on all horror comics publications (original and reprinted) completely that year. They limped along for an additional year with romance and war comics before closing their doors in 1956 and effectively ending comics publishing in English Canada for decades.

Here's what the US edition looks like, courtesy of our sponsor CGC Comics.

The US edition of Tales from the Crypt #20 (the first issue of the title, incidentally) is cover dated October/November 1950, so I would surmise that since Superior had the rights to repackage EC Comics from 1949 on, that the Canadian edition was issued shortly afterward, but I’m afraid that I don’t know the exact lag time between first US publication and the Canadian repackaged edition. So to answer your question – it was published in late 1950/early 1951.

John Bell has some great information about Superior Comics and the post-war Canadian comics scene over at the Collections Canada website.

Hope that helped!

Is the Amazon Kindle on Fire?

Industry experts are predicting that 4 million Amazon Kindles will be sold in 2010, with 59 million Kindle-friendly devices being sold between the Apple eReader, the Kindle and the Apple iPhone.

This is a new way for publishers to reach readers in the digital age. The Kindle and other ereaders are being touted to advertisers for message delivery.

Jim Thebeau
<a href=”http://www.hrb-ideas.com”>Henry Russell Bruce</a>

Up until recently authors get left out by the side of the road by themselves from their Publishers (I speak from an author’s experience).  Random House is trying to bring their authors into web 2.0 with a little help and support.  Since Authors have always been the best form of PR (they are the ones who go out on the road, actually do the PR) the props from the Publishers should be welcomed and appreciated.   See what Techcrunch reports about Random House and Mobile Roadie.

Mobile Roadie And Random House Partner To Launch iPhone Apps For Authors

Posted: 21 Dec 2009 04:54 AM PST

Hey Everyone!

So it’s the final week before Christmas! Unfortunately the weather warmed up around here, so I don’t think we’ll be having a white christmas My husband already got his present (A bowling ball) and I got mine! (A 32″ TV for above the foot of the bed!)

My editor got done with Raven: Book Three of Feather Book Series just yesterday! So, not long until that book hits the market! I’m looking forward to being done with the series! I just hope I ended it the right way My editor said she cried, lol. So that’s a good thing!

I’m hoping to get all I need finalized on that project before my sister in law’s wedding on Jan. 9th. Her wedding is going to be gorgeous! I bought these heels, and I’m beginning to question my choice, and fear that I might just fall on my butt. But falling on my butt will take the stress off her, so I guess that’s my Matron of Honor duty…

Matron of Honor, makes me feel so old!

I’m not that old…

Other things I’m working on are a few new book covers for my editor’s new books! Looks like she turned her attention from romance novels to Young Adult Fantasy Fiction, and Vampire romance at that! I haven’t read any of her book yet, but I have a feeling it will be good! So, for all you Vampire lovers out there, watch for that! I think I myself will throw a vampire in my New series Knight Angels, but just a secondary character…

Well, two cups of coffee down, and it’s time to start my day:

Pilates

Running

Market

Post Office

Office

Writing

Make Dinner (Teriyaki chx and rice)

and then bed!

I want to extend a warm welcome to everyone that stops by Romance at Your Fingertips for a visit! 

Don’t be misled by the title of my blog.  When I say Romance, I mean the Romance of Everything.   My blog site isn’t only about the latest romance and paranormal romance novels, you’ll find my thoughts on book and movie reviews, wholesome family involved stories, fantastic author interviews, sneak peeks into upcoming book releases, recipes,  links and pages to my own books, and an exclusive look into my world. 

In the side columns, you can connect with fantastic publishers,visit intriguing author sites, and blog sites that have fascinated me!  Feel free to explore what might interest you.

I’m happy to count each and every one of you among my friends and encourage you to come back often. 

Check out my other sites on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Linkedln, Shelfari and LibraryThing!

“there is no separation

between the self and the rest of creation”

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“life is a drop

containing the ocean”

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“powered by the central meridian

that all and everything lives in”

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“souls pass through stained glass

no colors contain us”

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“sandcastle and a feather

the mud that holds you together”

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“the Great Mind knows

how all books go”

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“the master intelligence

each of us contains and represents”-

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“what thunders

lightening’s power?’

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“many in body, one in mind

we are intertwined”

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“viscous and meniscus

the flow of what life is”

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“where liquid sunshine also hides

for drops are thinking deep inside”

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“there is no present, future, or past

because through eternity the mind is cast”

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“there is another realm it’s true

the vibratory field we cannot view”

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“there are no others just different kinds

of many bodies and one mind”

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Click on < or > to visit other categories, hundreds more “miniatures” will be posted soon.

(c) 2009    Unknownheartist@gmail.com

From the Publishing Perspectives blog, we can see that China is not standing still when it comes to this intellectual property race.  In this case, they don’t need to copy, they are getting there first!

Shanda’s Stunning Success

By Wen Huang

(This article originally appeared in the Publishing Perspectives’ Frankfurt Edition on October 16)

In Chinese, the word Shanda means “grand and big” and the namesake company Shanda Literature Ltd. (SDL) certainly lives up to its name.

The company runs three popular literary web sites of user generated fiction: Qidian (www.qidian.com) is targeted at young men and features kung-fu stories, science fiction, military and general history, while Jinjiang (www.jjwxc.net) and Hongxiu (www.hongxiu.com) publish romance and is read primarily by young female readers. Together, the three sites attract more than 500 million page views a day.

CEO Hou Xiaoqiang, 34, says this kind of traffic makes it the most popular literary web site in China, if not the world.

What’s more, the company continues to grow, with Shanda’s users posting 50 million words—or the equivalent of thousands of new books—per day.

The company is a subsidiary of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited, a firm best known for its online games. Shanda Interactive acquired Quidian in 2004 and Jinjiang and Hongxiu in 2007, bringing them together under the umbrella of Shanda Literature only last year.

Collectively, Shanda has a database of 2.7 million user-generated titles. In all, some 700,000 writers have contributed to Shanda’s sites.
“We have a unique business model in digital publishing,” says Hou, who worked for Sina.com, one of China’s largest internet portals, prior to joining Shanda. Users accessing the sites can read the first half of a book for free and then pay a small charge (about 3 cents per one thousand characters) for the rest of a book. The company splits the profits with the author.

Any writer can register with Shanda and post their fictional works on any of the three sites they choose. Shanda editors look for titles that have commercial potential and may subsequently sign them to a contract to published their work as a traditional book or modify it for other types of media, such as films, cartoons or games.

So far, the strategy is working. Shanda has put some 1,500 books into print, and according to Hou, approximately 90 of the top 100 most popular Chinese books searched by readers on Chinese Google and Baidu (another popular search engine) are from the Shanda websites.
“Our literary sites have brought together the most talented writers in Chinese online literature,” boasts Hou, who sites Zhang Wei as one example. Known to his online fans as Tangjia Sanshao (The Third Boy of the Tang Family), Zhang is one of the most successful Shanda writers. At 29, he’s the author of nine bestselling book series (comprising ten to 14 titles per series), with each selling about 400,000 copies.

A former web engineer, Zhang started to post his work on Qidian in 2004 and caught the attention of Shanda editors after his first novel became an online sensation. “I always had a passion for fantasy novels,” said Zhang. His books, with titles such as Crazy God, Son of the Light and the King God of Death, star heroes who live on alien planets and save their world through the use of magic and superpowers.
“Shanda has made it possible for me to become a professional writer,” Zhang said. “It would have been difficult with the traditional print publishing.” He tests his stories by posting them first online to gauge reader reaction before committing them to print and produces about one new series per year.

Shanda CEO Hou has big ambitions for his writers. On his way to meet his US counterparts in Hall 8 at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Hou said he was on his way to soliciting partners to publish and distribute Shanda literary works worldwide. “We hope to create our own Harry Potter-like phenomenon,” he said.

So, I’m going to take a stab at this. These are my three top picks from the last decade, but you’re more than welcome to give me your own opinions. They’re in no particular order, so don’t judge me there I just really like these books!!!

We’re coming into a new age in the world of reading. With the gaining popularity of books like Twilight, and the fact that reading has once again become trendy with the Kindle, being in the book industry is no longer shrouded by those wearing tweed coats with leather elbow patches! Writers are quickly becoming celebrities, and the pandemonium of boy bands now seems to be rolling over into Book Characters like Edward!

The last decade has lended us with an array of great books. I see more and more movies “based on the book by…” then I believe I ever have! And it’s great! What author wouldn’t want their books acted out and visualized??

So feast your eyes on my all too familiar three picks, all books I will continue to read for the rest of my life…

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Inkheart

AMAZON REVIEW:

Meggie’s father, Mo, has an wonderful and sometimes terrible ability. When he reads aloud from books, he brings the characters to life–literally. Mo discovered his power when Maggie was just a baby. He read so lyrically from the the book Inkheart, that several of the book’s wicked characters ended up blinking and cursing on his cottage floor. Then Mo discovered something even worse–when he read Capricorn and his henchmen out of Inkheart, he accidentally read Meggie’s mother in.

Meggie, now a young lady, knows nothing of her father’s bizarre and powerful talent, only that Mo still refuses to read to her. Capricorn, a being so evil he would “feed a bird to a cat on purpose, just to watch it being torn apart,” has searched for Meggie’s father for years, wanting to twist Mo’s powerful talent to his own dark means. Finally, Capricorn realizes that the best way to lure Mo to his remote mountain hideaway is to use his beloved, oblivious daughter Meggie as bait!

Cornelia Funke’s imaginative ode to books and book lovers is sure to be enjoyed by fans of her breakout debut, The Thief Lord, and young readers who enjoyed the similarly themed The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley. (Ages 10 to 15) –Jennifer Hubert –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

WHY I CHOSE IT:

I loved this book, and not only that, I loved the movie. Wildly imaginative, and a literal classic. How could you not love it? Enough said.

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Harry Potter Paperback Box Set (Books 1-7)

AMAZON REVIEW:

Say you’ve spent the first 10 years of your life sleeping under the stairs of a family who loathes you. Then, in an absurd, magical twist of fate you find yourself surrounded by wizards, a caged snowy owl, a phoenix-feather wand, and jellybeans that come in every flavor, including strawberry, curry, grass, and sardine. Not only that, but you discover that you are a wizard yourself! This is exactly what happens to young Harry Potter in J.K. Rowling’s enchanting, funny debut novel, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. In the nonmagic human world–the world of “Muggles”–Harry is a nobody, treated like dirt by the aunt and uncle who begrudgingly inherited him when his parents were killed by the evil Voldemort. But in the world of wizards, small, skinny Harry is famous as a survivor of the wizard who tried to kill him. He is left only with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, curiously refined sensibilities, and a host of mysterious powers to remind him that he’s quite, yes, altogether different from his aunt, uncle, and spoiled, piglike cousin Dudley.

A mysterious letter, delivered by the friendly giant Hagrid, wrenches Harry from his dreary, Muggle-ridden existence: “We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.” Of course, Uncle Vernon yells most unpleasantly, “I AM NOT PAYING FOR SOME CRACKPOT OLD FOOL TO TEACH HIM MAGIC TRICKS!” Soon enough, however, Harry finds himself at Hogwarts with his owl Hedwig… and that’s where the real adventure–humorous, haunting, and suspenseful–begins. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, first published in England as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, continues to win major awards in England. So far it has won the National Book Award, the Smarties Prize, the Children’s Book Award, and is short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, the U.K. version of the Newbery Medal. This magical, gripping, brilliant book–a future classic to be sure–will leave kids clamoring for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (Ages 8 to 13) –Karin Snelson

WHY I CHOSE IT:

Do I really have to explain?? But basically, not only did Rawlings come up with SEVEN great hits, she also created a whole new world, whole new characters, and a movie series that’s KILLER! and will be for years to come. This author is a literary heavyweight.

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The Twilight Saga Collection

AMAZON REVIEW:

Stephenie Meyer’s life changed dramatically on June 2, 2003.  The stay-at-home mother of three young sons woke-up from a dream featuring seemingly real characters that she could not get out of her head.  “Though I had a million things to do (i.e. making breakfast for hungry children, dressing and changing the diapers of said children, finding the swimsuits that no one ever puts away in the right place), I stayed in bed, thinking about the dream. Unwillingly, I eventually got up and did the immediate necessities, and then put everything that I possibly could on the back burner and sat down at the computer to write—something I hadn’t done in so long that I wondered why I was bothering.”  Meyer invented the plot during the day through swim lessons and potty training, then writing it out late at night when the house was quiet.  Three months later she finished her first novel, Twilight.  

Twilight was one of 2005’s most talked about novels and within weeks of its release the book debuted at #5 on The New York Times bestseller list.  Among its many accolades, Twilight was named an “ALA Top Ten Books for Young Adults,” an Amazon.com “Best Book of the Decade&So Far”, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.  The movie version of Twilight will be released by Summit Entertainment nationwide on November 21, 2008, starring Kristen Stewart (“Into The Wild”) and Robert Pattinson (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”). 

The highly-anticipated sequel, New Moon, was released in September 2006 and spent 31 weeks at the #1 position on The New York Times bestseller list.  Eclipse, the third book in Meyer’s Twilight saga, was released on August 7, 2007 and sold 150,000 copies its first day on-sale.  The book debuted at #1 bestseller lists across the country, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.   The fourth and final book in the Twilight Saga, Breaking Dawn, was published on August 2, 2008, with a first printing of 3.2 million copies – the largest first printing in the publisher’s history.   Breaking Dawn sold 1.3 million copies its first day on-sale rocketing the title to #1 on bestseller lists nationwide. 

Meyer’s highly-anticipated debut for novel adults, The Host, was released by Little, Brown and Company in May 2008 and debuted at #1 on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. 

Stephenie Meyer graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in English Literature.  She lives in Arizona with her husband and sons.

WHY I CHOSE IT:

I know, I know, duh, right? But really, when it comes down to it, Stephanie threw gas on the fire that is the supernatural literature relm. We’ve always loved our supernatural reads, but now it seems I can’t go anywhere without hearing about vampires. Even alcohol commercials are banking on it! Aside from the fact that they’re a good read, they’re also a godsend to all the supernatural writers out there, including me. Literacy is once again POPULAR!!!!

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Special thanks to all those out there that have helped to make this December my best book month yet! When I released my first book last December, I never would have imagined that I’d come this far in only one year! 2009 has been a year of discovery for me, and after all is done, I will look back on this year with fond memories. I stumbled into this career choice, but I now know that I would never have it any other way! Suprises are what life is all about, afterall.

Here’s to another great year!

“courageously light the candle of today

and lead the way”

(c) 2009  Unknownheartist@gmail.com

The Japan Times features a wonderful Christmas Eve story about the growing popularity of male maid cafes. What I love is that this trend of men assuming the maid costume is presented as having nothing to do with sexuality or gender identity.

1. Men like dressing as women, and it’s becoming more acceptable.

Behind this nascent trend, observers say, is that more men are beginning to enjoy dressing as a woman from a fashion viewpoint, and society is becoming more tolerant of the practice.

2. There are not enough women workers.

It started when one of the regular waitresses quit.

3. Male customers feel more comfortable being served by men.

“Men who are not used to being served by women can feel relaxed and talk to the ‘maids’ easily because they are male,” said Chaan Sarin, who heads the cafe’s waitstaff.

4. For the maids, cross-dressing provides stress-relief from work. It’s only temporary, the girlfriend does not know, and this personal therapy will be ended with marriage.

“I become a totally different person to release my stress from work. I have the feelings of a man and I will quit once I get married,” he said.

5. Manga makes them do it.

More male fans are also dressing like their favorite female characters in “anime’ animation and computer games.

6. Publishing houses are helping men look better in drag.

Cashing in on this trend, Osaka-based Yu-time Publishing released the book “Otokonoko no Tameno Henshin Gaido” (“Guide for Boys to Transform Themselves”) in October 2008.

7. Tolerance is related to looking pretty, and new media sources allow men to be prettier women today.

“People began to accept men dressed as women, saying it is OK as long as they are beautiful. At the same time, as there is more information nowadays on how to dress like women, men have gotten dramatically better at it.”

Japan has the most awesome combination of extreme kinkiness and feigned innocence.

What could only be imagined a few years ago can become reality today…or soon.

From the smart thinkers at Future Perfect Publishing blog:

In his gem “So Many Books,” Gabriel Zaid characterized Socrates’ criticism of writing thus:

Conversation depends on those who take part in it: who they are, what they know, what interests them,  what they’ve just said.  In contrast, books are unfeeling monologues.  They ignore the circumstances in which they’re read.  They repeat the same things over and over, without taking the reader into account.  They pay no heed to his questions or responses.

The printed book seems to offer only the opportunity for that quiet conversation you have with the author in your head/  You might imagine other readers of the book sharing your sentiments, but there is really no easy way to know.

Of course a book is an object of culture.  For example, if you want to share a reading experience you can join a book club or talk about it with a friend.   Both of these social interactions have proven very effective in determining the popularity of a book.  Yet this type of conversation is constrained by geography, and if no one nearby shares your particular interest in a book, it’s back to that silent dialogue in your mind.

What Socrates couldn’t have imagined was how the Internet, wireless communication and e-paper could bring true conversation to the written word.  Suddenly, the prospect of printed books that are interactive and connected to the rest of the world opens up a different kind of shared reading experience.  Every page of the book becomes a web page.  Every word, sentence and paragraph can become a link to a community of readers with simlar interests to your own.  Now the book is a mobile platform.  Sharing what you read can transcend the limits of geography and time.

What would this new experience look like?  Here are some thoughts about two key ingredients.

Layering – Every book would feature multiple layers.  The substrate is the book text, illustrations and photos such as we have today.  Readers can add virtual layers to this substrate.  Floating above the substrate is an embedded application layer for things like search, word lookup, communications and so on.  A third layer might be reserved for the reader’s own annotations, which could be turned on or off (so as not to annoy others who might want to read the book in its pristine form).  Another layer could belong to the author, containing background material similar to the bonus features that come on many DVDs.  Publishers could have a layer to let readers know about book signings, readings and author appearances.  But the most interesting layer could be a social or conversation layer, where the reader could view other individuals’ reactions to various passages in the book and share their own.

Connection – The book could be connected to social networks to which the reader belonged whose members might share similar interests.  Publishers could even provide a centralized service that helped readers connect with their fellow book travelers.  Readers could use text or visual tagging to express their reactions to various passages in the book and then share theese through widgets.  This could add a dimension of community to the book.  It would be easy to excerpt and share with others virtually.  You could even have a twitter function that would allow readers to follow each others progress through the book.

Technology offers the potential to bring the conversation to the book in a very literal sense.  As Zaid observed:

With few exceptions, the world of the book has no connection to massive and undifferentiated markets; it relies instead on segmented clienteles, specialized niches and members of different clubs of enthusiasts.  But not all publishers, booksellers and librarians see the importance of giving shape to these clubs; of making lists of potential readers; of welcoming and facilitating direct contact; of taking into account the tastes and opinions of the participants; of organizing coherent and lively conversations.  The success that many small and medium size houses have had along these lines confirms the idea that organizing the world of books is like organizing a conversation.

As the book expands to become a connected, interactive, mobile device, we will need to define a new aesthetic for the medium of the printed word.  We will need to see it not just as a conversation starter, but as the instrument of conversation itself.  Now that’s worth having a conversation about.

Today we welcome Angela James, Editor of Carina Press to the RWAus blog to answer your questions.

1. Have you chosen all the books for the launch of Carina Press or are you still looking for more?

Not at all, as of today (December 17th) we’ve actually only acquired three authors, for a total of six titles, and though we do have half a dozen more slated for acquisition, we’re still searching for additional launch month titles.

2. Will the cover price be different for different lengths of books?  ie. will shorter works be sold for less?

Yes. We haven’t set our final prices yet, but they will be competitive within the digital market and based on word count.

3. How many submissions did Carina Press get?

In the first two weeks of opening to submissions, we had nearly 300 manuscripts submitted!

4. How long will the wait time be on submissions?

Wait time is currently 8 to 12 weeks. To start, we’re taking just about every bit of this because we announced we were open to submissions the same day I started the job! And so, I had no editors hired yet to read submissions. Now that I have 8 editors hired, with 2 more to come, submissions are getting read very quickly.

5. And when will you be coming Down Under again?

Oh, I loved every minute of my trip to Australia, you have no idea how much I’d like to come back. And maybe make it to Sydney this time! Truly, the Australia RWA members and everyone I met while wandering around Brisbane and Melbourne were fantastic and I just had a lovely time discovering the food, the culture and the sites. I’d come back next month if I could! But sadly, I have no immediate plans for visiting. Some day…

6. What format will the books take? Is it true there will be no DRM, in which case, how does this affect piracy and posting of author’s works on torrent and file sharing sites?

Books will be available in ePub and PDF formats for sure, we haven’t decided on the other formats quite yet.

There will be no DRM on files, but this doesn’t haven’t any affect on piracy. Pirates are technically savvy people and DRM is not a deterrent to piracy as is evidenced by the sheer number of titles available to pirate, that were sold only with DRM on them. Those who pirate know how to strip DRM within a minute’s work if they want to upload it to the sites so DRM doesn’t stop piracy. At Carina, we believe that DRM does, however, stop customers from making legitimate purchases and also accessing their content. DRM is a barrier for many people, who find it confusing, frustrating and a reason not to buy.

7. Will they be available at legitimate ebook seller sites or only through Carina Press?

Carina Press titles will be available through third-party distributors as well. Essentially, we want to be where readers are!

8. Are there any plans to traditionally print bestselling stories at a later date?

The future is full of possibilities!

9. Will the royalties be similar to other epublishers (i.e. 35-40%)

Royalties will be 30% of cover price from direct Carina sales and 15% of cover price from third-party retailers. There is no option clause in the contract and we request a term of seven years.

10. Are you concentrating on any particular content? And what won’t you be publishing?

We’ll be focusing on romance and all its subgenres, but will also be publishing a variety of fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, urban fantasy, mystery, thrillers, women’s fiction and more.

Right now, the only two things I can say we won’t be publishing is poetry and young adult.

Thank you, Angela, for taking time out to answer our questions.We wish you lots of success with Carina Press, and perhaps we’ll see some of our members chosen as Carina Press authors. For more information about Carina Press, visit their website.

Sure, it’s a meaningless diversion and a cynical commentary on how low print journalism has fallen. But it is also teh ossum. Here’s a compilation video of all the headlines from newspapers featured on the Simpsons. I defy you to tell the difference between these and the Sun/Province any day of the week:

A group comprising some of the magazine industry's largest publishers have made plans to create a digital storefront catering to owners of e-readers & other digital devices.

Own a Kindle?; On the waiting list for a Nook? If you’re a proud owner of either one of these popular e-readers, or simply just like to read, then you’re in for a real treat: in early December, an organization consisting of some of the magazine industry’s largest publishers (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst and Meredith Corp.) unveiled their intentions to develop a new digital storefront, ‘Next Issue Media’ which will give readers access to well-read publications on a variety of digital devices they own. With these publishers collectively representing an audience that’s 140 million readers strong, this news is bound to turn some heads.

“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops.” (John Squires, Executive VP, Time Inc.)

Participating publishers have stated their venture is composed of a four-point plan:

1. to create a highly featured, common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication;
2. to create a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices;
3. to create a digital storefront offering a large selection of reading options; and
4. to create a selection of advertising opportunities.

Though I personally believe nothing beats the look and feel of a real magazine in your hands, it would be nice to get rid of the big pile of them I’ve been hoarding in the corner…

More Info Here

Sports Illustrated have unveiled a prototype of a rather snazzy looking tablet device capable of displaying rich SI content in the form of a digital magazine.

The video shows off the range of functionality the tablet should be capable off, a touch screen with plenty of customisable features to display photos, videos and interactive options certainly all looks very impressive, which could define where magazines are to go in an increasingly digital age.

Can we expect the SI Tablet to be on many a Christmas wish list sometime in the new decade or is something like the new Guardian iPhone app the future for digitalised content? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below and in the meantime have a very Merry Christmas, we’ll be back in the New Year with more from the world of Moreover and beyond!

To list or not to list, that is the burning question. Do you create a this is what I want to accomplish in the New Year list or not? I mean do you sit down and write out your goals for the year? I was thinking about my writing goals for the next year and to accomplish most of them I’m going to need some righteous help from people. I think I need to have two lists. One will be the actual goals which I can attain by hard work. Things on that list would include:

1. Completing the Time Jumper Series 2. Writing the new query for the first book 3. Actually sending the query out 4. Don’t forget the synopsis 5. Send the entire manuscript to publishers who accept paranormal romance stories without an agent 6.Edit the Storm Tales and write the next book in that series. 7.Repeat 2,3,4 8.Finish NaNoWriMo vampire story 9. Write that fan fiction piece and POST IT (shudders) 10. Write the chic story idea without any paranormal stuff (real life shizz scares me) And the list could continue on and on and on…

Now the second list would be the I Wish this Would Happen List, but I’m Gonna Need Some Help:

1.Get an agent 2. Get Published! (that’s the big one ~ in theory this could be the only one on this list) 3.Well, as long as we’re dreaming here ~ Best Seller List 4. Book Tour 5. Mulitple Book Deal 6. Movie Deal 7. Meet Robert Pattinson…..where did THAT come from? faints….THUD…can’t believe I’m writing this stuff in plain view of like, everyone…GASP…groans…comes back down to reality…crumples up dream list, but you never know do you…some of this shizz must happen to someone…smooths out list again and sticks it in journal. Sigh…IF ONLY

When I was in the videogame industry I always compared videogames not to movies, but to books.  The gamer and the reader are the same.  They both explore a world that is not theirs and claim their own voice and avatar within the story. Each page is another level and as they conclude the story they achieve a sense of satisfaction and achievement that is unlike any other entertainment form.  Liz Bury sees it too in her article:

Here is the photo album of the next set of Authors that wrote articles in The New Writers Handbook 2007, Editor Philip Martin and Preface by Erica Jong. This book has been fun to write about and I’ve created two videos (out of 5) so far for the book’s authors and contents (titles of the articles). I am repeating myself. Sorry I’ve been working over 12 hours already making the videos and now my blog’s have to be updated. It took me less time to find this set of Authors. Two of them I could not find at all! If they see this post and would like to let me know where their pictures are, just leave a comment with the URL and I’ll update this portion of the site! (ie -28 LYNN FRANKLIN – PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTION IN NONFICTION,30 LINDA ADAMS – RUNNING A CRITIQUE GROUP)

I was so glad that Philip Martin had footnotes with each Author, because I could not find most of the pictures just by the name.

It was frustrating, so I had to put into my google search the name of a book or a blog and even then I had to look for a needle in a haystack.
I spent a total of 12 hours doing these two videos, working non stop. Well I had a break for some Pizza and Pop.

Thanks for watching Idea Girl Consulting Youtube’s videos!

15 BRANDI REISSENWEBER - THE ART OF THE START

16 RIDLEY PEARSON - THE 3-ACT STRUCTURE

17 WILLIAM G. TAPPLY - THE INVISIBLE WRITER

18 J. MARK BERTRAND - BEYOND SHOWING & TELLING

19 GREGORY MARTIN - A CHECKLIST FOR CHARACTER & CONFLICT REVISION

20 ROSINA LIPPI - LYRICISM IN SEX SCENES

21 JANE REICHHOLD - HAIKU TECHNIQUES

22 LAURA BACKES - WHAT DR. SEUSS CAN TEACH US

23 EVAN MORRIS - GLAMOUR & GRAMMAR

24 MARCIA YUDKIN - M-FACTORS, QUALITIES THAT HELP YOU BREAK INTO MAJOR MAGAZINES

25 LARRY GETLEN - RECREATING NONFICTION SCENES

26 LINDA FORMICHELLI - GETTING THE TOUGH INTERVIEW

27 Roy Peter Clark the line between fact fiction

29 W. TERRY WHALIN - JOIN A CRITIQUE GROUP

31 JUDY BRIDGES - SNAPPY INTRODUCTIONS

32 MARYLAINE BLOCK - MY FIRST RULE OF INFORMATION