Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 210

Are Men & Women Writers Being Treated Equally?

There's no doubt that humanity's history shows women being overly oppressed and their worth being heavily suppressed.

But, in our "Modern" world, are the creative writers who are female getting the attention they deserve?

A female writer from Australia, Jane Watson (who's been interviewed on this blog), sent me a link to the article, A Woman's Place, from The Age.

The article discusses how women are treated by the major literary publications, including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.

While looking at whether the reviewers are men or women and whether more men are being reviewed is important, this type of analysis only shows the issue from the perspective of traditional publishing. I would love to see figures (if they exist) for self-published authors; though, they still seem to be ignored by major review publications.

The Age article cites a study done by VIDA, an American organisation for women in the literary arts, called The Count. Fifteen major review publications are included.

The results are very graphic—all one has to do is scan the page and look at the red sections of the pie-charts, the number of men—and it becomes blindingly clear that men are receiving more coverage than women.

There are certainly a number of questions to be asked:

Are the number of reviews in the traditional publishing arena a fair view of the status of women writers?

Is the sex of the reviewer important?

Are women writers being published less often than men?

Still, the article in The Age brings up another concern…

Even if women writers are being systematically ignored, is it somehow wrong to make a big deal out of it?

From the article in The Age: "…Australian writer Kirsten Tranter has said: 'It's become possible for respected critics to openly admit — not just when they're drunk at a party but in public, in writing — that they think issues of gender equality are dated and irrelevant and that women who complain about it are privileged whingers.'"

Another important excerpt from that article:

"Women write about half the books published. Sixty-two per cent of publishers are women (although most senior roles are held by men). Women make up 80 per cent of fiction readers. And according to British research, they buy almost twice as many books of all kinds as men do.

"And yet there remains a perception that compared with men, women writers and their works, both past and present, are far more often marginalised, belittled, pigeonholed, dismissed, ignored."

Perhaps this post can help a bit…

Perhaps the innovations in self-publishing will empower readers to select and review more women writers…

In case you're curious, here's a list of women who have made an impact through their fiction or journalism or poetry in the 20th Century.

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Tagged: Equality of Women, Jane Watson, London Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, VIDA, Women Writers, Women's writing in English

Suppression of Higher Education Is A Crime

This post may seem off-topic for a blog about Reading, Writing, and Publishing but those arenas of life often demand Higher Education.

My recently published novel explores the cost to society from governmental suppression and Educators are being severely suppressed right now…

Last September, I posted, Trying To Educate Others Can Get You Arrested??, which explored the initiative, Education Under Fire. Here's an excerpt from that post:

"A letter I received recently says the initiative, Education Under Fire, '…will include a striking 30-minute documentary to be co-presented with Amnesty International; an open letter to the international academic community coauthored by Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jose Ramos Horta, President of East Timor, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu; and a campaign to take—to campuses and communities across the country—a series of meetings combining a screening of the documentary with conversation.'"

The video had its double premiere in New York City on Friday, October 28th at Columbia University and Saturday, October 29th at New York University.

From other coverage of the initiative :

"Less than a month after the New York premiere of Education Under Fire (EUF), the documentary screened at four Boston-area campuses with resounding success in the campaign's mission to raise awareness about the plight of students in Iran.

"EUF tells the story of the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), a community-run initiative in Iran that serves young Baha'is who are barred from university because of their religious beliefs.

"On Nov. 11 the film screened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in conjunction with the Amnesty International Northeast Regional Conference."

In my original post, I said:

[Even though this initiative is] "…about a particular type of educational suppression, of a particular group of people, in a particularly oppressed country, Jose Ramos Horta and Desmond Tutu are working to support and aid these people… Because they are members of Our Human Family and because inaction is unconscionable…". I would now add that when one group is suppressed and ignored by the rest of humanity, Humanity itself draws closer to danger…

Education Under Fire has received much attention in the Press and is actively seeking individuals and groups who are willing to spread the Message.

The following video says, "Coming Soon", but the documentary is now available, planning tools for screenings and informed conversations are available, the Nobel Laureates' Letter is available for you to endorse, and there are more short videos…

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Tagged: Amnesty International, Desmond Tutu, Higher education, Iran, Jose Ramos Horta, MIT, Nobel Peace Prize, Notes from An Alien

What Readers Want vs What Writers Write

Is there a disconnect between what readers want to read and what writers want to write?

I don't personally know all readers or writers but I do scan a multitude of blogs and other folks seem to think bloggers know what they're talking about…

Many writing blogs advise "surveying" the readers then writing what they want.

Yet, I'm sure there are readers who rarely find what they like; just like there are writers who rarely think about readers.

Is the solution that writers should "somehow" find out what readers want and try to write something catering to this "knowledge".

In that last sentence, the words in quotes indicate my belief that knowing what readers want is "tricky" at best.

Sure, you can look at the numbers of sales of various types of books and draw conclusions about what readers want, but…

What if the books sold reflect the taste of publishers and the readers are choosing their fare from a limited buffet?

Then, the "conclusion" about what to write so readers will like it (along with the usual motivation to make bucks) is a game being played on an exceedingly small field.

As far as the problem with publishers restricting what's available to readers, self-publishing is beginning to widen what's available.

As far as the slavish desire to warp creative potential by imitating what others have done just to satisfy an audience that could well be unaware other books could please them more, I must pause and gather my courage…

I feel there are way too many assumptions being accepted in the Book World:

Many  readers assume they have to settle for what's being offered.

Many writers assume they must cleave to a formula to succeed.

Many publishers assume the monetary bottom line is the place to begin their evaluations.

Hopefully, when self-publishing attains some measure of stability, readers will have easy and efficient ways to find what they Really want to read.

As far as the challenge of writers pleasing readers and still sticking to their own principles:

In a post from last January, Do You Write For The Reader or Should You Write For Yourself?, I said, "Read as widely and deeply as you possibly can. Read till you're bored and then read more. Absorb as much of our Human Family's hopes and dreams and challenges and fears and dangers and failures and quirks as you possibly can–absorb it into what you could call your internal Meta-Reader.

"Then, when you sit down to create, let that Meta-Reader decide what is absolutely necessary to write………"

What are your thoughts and feelings?

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Tagged: publish, publishing, reader, reading, writer, Writers Resources, writing, Writing Success

Does Anyone Absolutely HAVE To Be Between The Author And Their Readers?

Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti, in the New York Times, has said:

"[T]he only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity."

I actually read that quote in an article by Mathew Ingram in GigaOM, last October, called, On the death of book publishers and other middlemen.

Just a bit further on in that article, Ingram says: "What's interesting about Grandinetti's comment, however, is that it doesn't exclude Amazon itself — or other book retailers — from being disrupted."

Can you imagine yourself, if your a writer, or others who are writers, taking a manuscript, editing it, formatting it, then making it available to readers directly through the Internet?

Can writers edit themselves?

Can they find all (or, ultra-realistically, most of) the typos?

Can they format ebooks properly?

Most interestingly, can they produce print versions then distribute them?

Actually, all those questions could be answered, "Yes".

Technically, it depends on the writer's abilities and bank account, but I'd still love to see your comments on that series of questions…

If we come to the conclusion that Someone has to be between the writer and the reader, Ingram provides a good benchmark for their necessity with this comment:

"…give authors what they most want and need. It's a quick and painless way of reaching their readers — as many readers as possible, in as many different ways as possible. Also, make sure they are really adding value to that relationship with an author, not just counting on the former gatekeeper status to keep authors in their stables."

Can you even imagine one writer who could take their manuscript and provide it, all by themselves, to thousands of readers?

Bonus Tip for Writers Reading This Post:

Steal the idea of a lone writer successfully providing books (or, short stories) to a large audience of readers; show what they have to struggle through to achieve the necessary skills beyond producing a manuscript; show them up against those who would judge them harshly; go ahead, write a story that has two protagonists: The Writer and The Reader :-)

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Tagged: Amazon, author, Gigaom, Mathew Ingram, publisher, reader, Russell Grandinetti, writer

How To Get The Slush Out of Self-publishing?

I used to call myself a self-published author, primarily since I haven't tried to use the traditional venue.

Actually I have a "publisher" but are they really a Publisher?

FastPencil doesn't edit my work, they don't pay me an advance, they don't acquire shelf-space in bookstores.

Perhaps they are a Publishing-Aid Company even though they are clearly listed as publisher…

So many things in the publishing realm are in flux and the best name for a given activity may take years to resolve itself.

Now Crowdsourcing is being proposed for "self-publishers".

Jane Friedman recently invited Scott VanKirk to guest post and, A Model for Crowdsourced Publishing, is, along with the fascinating comments, worth a read.

The basic idea for a crowdsourcing publishing site is best explained by my including an excerpt from the post:

"This site would offer membership to anyone who wants one. Any member of this site would have an opportunity to participate in the publishing pipeline in one or more roles. The goal of all these roles is to get a story published. Each person that is involved with a book project will receive some of the revenues from the sale of these books. The roles and their percentage of the revenues from a sale might look something like this:

Writer: 65%
Website: 15% (to run site, promote books, print books)
Critiquer/Collaborator: up to 20% (agreed beforehand, and writer can also grant from their own percentage)
Editor: up to 20% (agreed beforehand, and writer can also grant from their own percentage)"

There's more to the idea and Scott gets a lot of comments that play further with the concepts, but…

One of the most important components to Scott's idea is that the reader is deeply integrated in the site functions, the reader has their say in who is doing their job well, the reader is enabled to find what they want, easily, and benefit from a collective publishing endeavor.

Go check out the full post and don't forget to read the comments.

If you return here and express your thoughts and feelings about crowdsourced publishing, I'll have a happier day :-)

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Tagged: Crowdsource, Crowdsourcing, Jane Friedman, publish, publishing, reader, Scott VanKirk, self-publishing

Must Writers Suffer Melancholy, Anguish, and Depression?

Being a creative writer seems to me to be one of the weirdest professions on the planet.

Catering to imaginary characters who may seem more real than the folks next door can bring certain challenges.

Many writers have faced suffering so debilitating they wanted to die—some have clung to suicide as their only solution…

Does it have to be this way?

Why would creating stories be so rife with mental and emotional distress?

Elizabeth Gilbert is an author who has discovered a path around the demons, shared some insights into the common malady, and given us a creative solution to the problems of Creativity.

If you are a writer, or know one, and you watch the video below, it would be wonderful if you shared your thoughts and feelings in our Comments…

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Tagged: Advice for Authors, Artistic Depression, authors, Creative Depression, creativity, Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, writers

In An Attention Deficit World, What Kind of Novel Do You Write?

Not all authors are bloggers. Many of them need to find bloggers they can work with. Blog Tour helps them get together.

I met Dale Cozort through Blog Tour and you get to read his Guest Post! And, be sure to leave Dale some feedback or a question in the Comments :-)

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In competing with other media, authors and publishers have to decide if they're going to go with the flow or cut against it. The competition for audience attention pushes all media in certain directions. As an author or publisher, do you go along with the trends or do you fight them?

First, what are the trends? Novels and print media in general used to have a clear field as far as entertainment went. Pre-television, where else could audiences go for entertainment? Radio dramas to a certain extent, music, which is not incompatible with reading, and movies which were a special treat, not something people indulged in every day. That was about it.

The competition gradually ramped up. Even in the "three channels and the president is on all of them" era, television competed with print for readers. That competition got stronger with the advent of cable, then digital cable and time-shifting and pre-recorded media. There is now almost never a time when you can't find something watchable on TV. If you don't like the current selection, check out On-Demand , or the programs saved on your DVR. Add to that the many other potential uses for reader eyeballs: increasingly immersive multiplayer video games like World of Warcraft, and of course the Internet. It's actually surprising that the book industry hasn't shrunk more than it has.

As the competition ramped up, so did the speed at which media of all kinds presented their stories. In an era where there are hundreds or thousands of competitors for reader attention, for reader eyeballs, slowing down to tell a more subtle story is often the cue for large parts of your audience to tune out and find a more exciting use of their eyeballs. Rapid-fire explosions and cleavage flashes increasingly win out over intelligent story lines. As audiences absorb more of that type of story-telling, attention spans shrink and it becomes more difficult for readers to tolerate slower-paced story-telling even if they want to.

Books are speeding up too, and it's arguable that they have to if they're going to compete. In a world of short attention spans, how can you avoid writing for short attention spans? In a world where you might have ten seconds to capture a reader's attention it's difficult not to start out with an unsubtle bang and keep the explosions coming. The way the publishing industry filters material makes it even more difficult to be subtle, especially if you don't have a big name to draw attention to yourself. The filtering mechanisms basically say you have at most thirty seconds to interest an agent or a publisher or a slushpile reader in your story. That leads to a glut of 'high concept' stories–stories that can be explained in a sentence or less: "Edgar Allen Poe, zombie killer", or "Mark Twain on the Rivers of Venus." (I made both of those up on the fly, by the way. I hope they aren't in use, though the second one actually sounds like it has potential in an over-the-top sort of way)

Should authors and publishers embrace the short attention span audience or play against it? If you go for the short attention span, how can you add depth and subtlety to your writing? Do authors or publisher have to win an audience by going through a period of writing/publishing stories that are all about easily marketable concepts and superficial stories that are all about flash and lots of things happening every page? Is there a niche for stories that deliberately go against the fast and superficial trend, that deliberately try to stand out from the crowd as slow and subtle? Fast isn't always good. "He's fast in bed" isn't a compliment. "The story was fast and superficial" isn't really a compliment either. "The high-concept line was the only good part of the story" isn't a compliment at all but it is, unfortunately, too often the reader experience these days.

I don't know the answer to those questions, to the issue of fast versus subtle. I do know that my own forays into writing have gone directly after the short attention span audience, but with a twist. For example, my science fiction novel Exchange moves fast, almost "Indiana Jones"-type fast. At the same time, I tried to add depth in such a way that you can read the novel at multiple levels, so that characters gradually get more solid as the story goes on, so that moral dilemmas pile up and I address important questions about the relationship between individuals and society, hopefully without sermonizing and without making the novel impossible to read without understanding those parts of it.

How well did that work? Based on the feedback so far I got the "it moves fast" part. I'm not sure how many people got or cared about the more subtle elements. Is that okay? If the reader came away satisfied, I guess it is.

So how do you cope with a short-attention span audience? Is it a given that you have to work with that audience? Is it something you can play with to differentiate yourself from the "high-concept", lots of explosions, and cleavage-shots crowd?

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Dale Cozort is a computer teacher, nature lover, and an avid amateur historian.  He has worked as a computer person for the Illinois Bureau of the Budget and DeKalb Genetics and as an underwriter for MetLife.

Dale loves science fiction and mysteries.  He lives with his wife, a teenage daughter, three cats and a couple of thousand books in a house built in 1864.  For many years his home, located in a university town sixty miles from Chicago, was also a foster home for stray or abandoned Samoyeds and Siberian Huskies.

Dale recently wrote Exchange, an alternate history novel where our risk-averse society suddenly has a frontier again, as a series of "Exchanges" temporarily swap town-sized pieces of our world with an alternate reality empty of humans, a wild, dangerous place people can go to start a new life if they're brave or crazy enough.

With little warning, computer guru Sharon Mack finds herself in a land where sabertooths, giant bears and even more dangerous creatures still roam, fighting giant predators, escaped convicts, and a mysterious cult to rescue her kidnapped daughter before the Exchange ends, trapping them forever.

Get Dale's Book At:

StairWay Press

And, At Amazon:

Trade Paperback or Kindle

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Tagged: Attention span, Dale Cozort, Fast-Paced Books, High Concept Stories, publishing, Readers Attention, Readers Attention Span

Readers Educated About Reading Translations

Many of my friends read and speak more than one language.

Alas, I have but English…

So, I became interest in an article by Alane Salierno Mason called, The Attraction-Repulsion of International Literature.

From the article:

"It remains true that American publishing houses tend to translate far fewer titles than European houses. Still, says Mason, America is becoming both more diverse and better educated. As the trend continues, the hint of the foreign should, she believes, become less challenging for readers."

Apparently, Americans (and, here, I assume they mean folks from the United States and not all the Americans in South America) have some prejudices about "foreign" authors.

The article sums up a potential resolution through education with, "It's pretty simple in the end, says Mason. In fact, it is almost unbearably obvious. 'We are all related', she says. 'Our lives and fates are interdependent'."

Mason founded Words Without Borders, which says about itself:

"Words without Borders translates, publishes, and promotes the finest contemporary international literature. Our publications and programs open doors for readers of English around the world to the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and literary perspective on world events offered by writers in other languages."

And, to peak your interest a bit more, here's a short video about it all :-)



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Tagged: Alane Salierno Mason, English language, English Translations, European Translations, Foreign Translation, Publishing Perspectives, Translation, Words Without Borders

Brand New, Non-Hype Interview !

Are you a writer? Do you know one?

I'm going to share a Must-See interview with you! Two talented guys actually making sense of the wild ride happening in the Book World…

Joel Friedlander interviews Dan Blank —> Challenges for Authors

Here's Joel's summary of the content of the video with my, exceedingly brief, comments:

Digital publishing will continue to be a big part of the business
Didn't we all know this? But, still, Dan has a fresh view.
Will self-publishing and traditional publishing learn to get along?
Maybe they don't have to :-)
Writing as a business, as a career
Don't let the work scare you!
How authors build a platform today
Wonderfully broad view on what various "platforms" can be :-)
The kinds of motivations that move writers
Really worth hearing…
Building up a support network
Again, don't let it scare ya.
Why writers have to build their own "roadmap"
Goal-attainment 101 but, again, a fresh view.

Here's the link to that video interview again.

I'd love it if you came back here and let me know what your thoughts and feelings are…

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Tagged: Dan Blank, E-books, ebooks, Joel Friedlander, publishing, Video Interview, writers, Writers Resources

Is There Really A "War" Going On Over Books?

If you regularly scan the news about books and publishing, you'll see words like "battle", "attack", and "war".

And, even though some folks are acting like combatants, is what's happening a "battle" or just a surge in innovation with those most pressed to change crying "War!"?

Salon has a topic section called, Art In Crisis.

Art may be in crisis and art could be called the normal arena of crisis—depends on how one defines "crisis".

The root meanings of "crisis" are, "to separate, decide, judge".

Sure, most folks use the word crisis in a negative way, not realizing that humanity and their own unconscious mind have positive meanings for the concept.

Also, for some people, any events that demand they separate things, or decide, or judge are deemed negative…

Salon's Art In Crisis section had a recent article called, Indies battle Amazon — by becoming publishers.

If you go read that article you'll find a tale of independent bookstores, for various reasons (most having nothing to do with "battling" Amazon), adapting their operations to include becoming their own publishers.

Cool, local independent bookstores are using new tech to expand their horizons and buffer their bottom lines.

Too bad that so many magazines feel they have to lie in their article titles…

Amazon may be a Giant in publishing.

Indi bookstores may be dealing with profitability issues.

All kinds of changes are happening in the Book-World.

Must we call it a War??

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Tagged: Amazon, Book War, Bookselling, Crisis In Publishing, Independent bookstore, publishing, Publishing War, Salon