Richard Harris's Blog, page 32
March 17, 2017
Down with Trad-Pub Deals
Elizabeth Craig wrote a positive-thinking, inspiring piece called “Why I’m Turning Trad-Pub Deals Down.” You can read the post through the previous link, but here are the highlights.
I make more money writing independently of a publisher. This is by far the top reason. I even made more self-publishing a few books than I did with more traditionally published books on the shelves.
I exploit all my rights and publish my book in a variety of formats or internationally. I can expand my reach to find more readers. Publishers frequently hold onto your international, audio book rights, etc.
I can make changes to my self-published books. Sometimes I’ll hear from readers about formatting or typos in my trad-published books…and it’s very frustrating knowing there’s nothing I can do.
I can make changes to my online profiles at the retailers and distributors I deal directly with. I had to deal with a lot of red tape to even get my photo up on Penguin Random House’s site last week. I was stunned to find it wasn’t up there. After all, I’ve written for the publisher since 2010 and my photo was available to them for the backs of the books.
The only reason I was able to jump through the hoops and get the picture uploaded was because an employee at Penguin for the Berkley imprint went above and beyond the call of duty as a conduit between me and the art department. My Memphis books aren’t listed or linked to on the page…they’re stranded in some sort of Nowhere Land without an author bio or picture, but at this point I don’t have the time to deal with it. Plus, my Riley Adams profile there has no bio or picture.
I can run promotions on books with lagging sales. I can make a book free. I can give a book away to gain newsletter subscribers (and then inform them of new releases for later sales gains). I can run quick weekend sales to make my books more visible on retail sites.
I can devote all my time and best ideas to the series that will pay me best. If I wrote an additional series for a trade publisher, I wouldn’t have as much time to devote to my other series. I felt at the end of my traditional publishing that I was saving my best ideas for my ‘own’ books.
I don’t feel the need to prove anything. Originally, it did feel good to be validated by a gatekeeper…I was a newer writer and I needed that. Now, I prefer reader validation. It’s ultimately more valuable.
I have price control. If I switched back to traditional publishing, my readers would experience higher prices for my new books and they’d be emailing me to ask me why.
I can choose my book covers. I got lucky with the covers I had from Penguin Random House. But going from complete creative control over the covers back to no control (they did always ask me what I thought of a cover before they signed off on it, but if I hadn’t liked it, I’m not sure they’d have pulled it/reworked it) would be challenging.
I can release books when I want. There could be large gaps between books: more than a year. Now I can release a couple of books in the same series in a year’s time, if I like.
March 16, 2017
Punctuation Pays! (Now Crime Will, Too)
Not since Lynne Truss published Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation have I laughed so hard at something so small: an ear-shaped part of punctuation.
Writing for The Guardian, Elena Cresci (@elenacresci) penned a fantastic piece entitled “Oxford comma helps drivers win dispute about overtime pay.” Who, the, what, the, where? The situation basically came down to this:
“In Maine, the much-disputed Oxford comma has helped a group of dairy drivers in a dispute with a company about overtime pay.
In a judgment that will delight Oxford comma enthusiasts everywhere, a US court of appeals sided with delivery drivers for Oakhurst Dairy because the lack of a comma made part of Maine’s overtime laws too ambiguous.”
Why the big deal, then? Well, consider an example Ms. Truss uses right there in her title. What’s the definition of a panda?
Panda: Eats shoots and leaves.
Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves.
With the former, we’ve got a cuddly bear that consumes bamboo and some shrub leaves. In the case of the latter, we’ve got a gangsta’ bear gone rogue, gun in hand, as it fires away and takes its leave. Done and done yo! Sorry, Done and done, yo!
Another example offered as damning evidence of that damned comma rearing its head (or not) in The Guardian article comes from what appears to be a book’s Acknowledgements section, in which the author wants to thank four special people. Or is it, in fact, two?
“This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.”
According to the punctuation, it sure as Shirley looks like the author won the parent lottery and got a Russian-American author as a mother and the Supreme Being as a Father. Sweet!
Anyway, you can read the article for yourself, or not, and then ponder the role and importance of commas, or perhaps ignore the issue, before scratching your head and asking yourself, Does a comma really demand this much respect?
Best ask Oakhurst Dairy for the answer. They’re the ones now on the hook for overtime pay because of that wily pest that, it seems, just won’t, you know, go away, even if you beg it to just fall into a coma, or maybe…
March 15, 2017
Philip Roth, the Donald & The Plot Against America
In a piece from the January 30, 2017 issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Judith Thurman wrote an intriguing article on Philip Roth and the American president entitled “Philip Roth E-mails on Trump.”
The question that Ms. Thurman poses is nothing short of staggering: Did Roth, somehow, through his book The Plot against America, inadvertently augur the rise of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States?
Since “retiring” from writing (or at least publishing) in 2010 at the age of 77, Mr. Roth has been fairly quiet in the public eye. Yet when asked if his novel “has happened here,” the Titan of Letters responded:
“It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”
When later asked by e-mail if “this warning” has befallen the United States – and by extension the rest of the world – Mr. Roth wrote:
“My novel wasn’t written as a warning. I was just trying to imagine what it would have been like for a Jewish family like mine, in a Jewish community like Newark, had something even faintly like Nazi anti-Semitism befallen us in 1940, at the end of the most pointedly anti-Semitic decade in world history. I wanted to imagine how we would have fared, which meant I had first to invent an ominous American government that threatened us. As for how Trump threatens us, I would say that, like the anxious and fear-ridden families in my book, what is most terrifying is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”
Gulp.
Professional Seminar for Freelancers & Writers
Don’t miss the upcoming “Creating Client Relationships that Rock,” a seminar for freelancers and writers hosted by @PWACToronto on March 27, 2017 at 7 p.m. in downtown Toronto.
Per the Professional Writers Association of Canada’s Toronto Branch’s website:
“If you earn your living as a freelancer, it’s essential to have great client relationships. This event will help you take good care of those all-important relationships and yourself too. Topics include building rapport with new clients and securing repeat work, the elements of a good contract, how to get paid when they’re not paying, and how to fire a bad client.”
March 14, 2017
The Evolution of Written Languages
There’s a Twitter thread called I F***ing love science (@IFLScience), which is spelled a number of ways, as well as a Facebook page, but I think there’s got to be one for I F***ing [image error]
TPL Book Sale Blowout
Bibliophiles of the world unite! The Toronto Public Library is having a fire sale on books you won’t want to miss.
The Friends’ Clearance Book Sale will take place at the Toronto Reference Library (789 Yonge St.) from March 16-18. All books are 10-50 cents (cash only)! In the parlance of today’s publishing world, “That’s basically free!”
To learn more about the event, click here.
Kellyanne Conway’s Future Book Reviews?
Not surprisingly, The New Yorker has managed, once again, to combine literature, politics and humour. Sorry, humor.
Writing for that rag of a magazine that the REAL media uses to wipe their arses with, Bob Vulfov (@bobvulfov) imagines what book reviews written by Donnie T.’s Counselor to the President – and co-author of What Women Really Want (no joke) – might look like in a piece called “Kellyanne Conway Spins Great Works of Literature.”
Although all of the reviews are literary gold, this one just might be my favourite. Sorry, favorite.
“Moby-Dick”
Time after time, I see the land media refer to Moby Dick as the embodiment of evil, and, frankly, this sort of coverage disappoints me. If they keep this up, partisanship will continue to divide creatures of the sea and creatures of the land. Throughout his campaign, Captain Ahab constantly blamed someone else for his own despair, but sometimes you just have to take a look in the mirror. All the polls said that Moby Dick had no shot against Captain Ahab, but look at what happened. Ahab’s ship was destroyed in a nautical landslide. The land media, the pollsters, the crew aboard the Pequod—they all got it wrong. Now it’s time to let the large whale-beast govern.
March 13, 2017
‘Come From Away’ Rocks It!
Congratulations to the cast and crew of Come From Away, the Canadian-produced musical that hit Broadway last night and knocked it off the runway, according to The New York Times.
If you don’t know anything about the story, keep it that way and go and see it.
For everyone else, on that fateful 11th day of September in 2001, a LOT of planes crossing the Atlantic had to be grounded in mid-flight as part of Operation Yellow Ribbon, so where better to land a schooner-load of ‘dem, experts reasoned, than in Gander, Newfoundland.
When all was said and done, 39 aircraft carrying about 6,600 passengers and crew members, or about half of Gander’s total population, touched down safely in the tiny Newfoundland town, where they then had to rely on the support and generosity of complete strangers (in a FOREIGN country!) until U.S. airspace opened up days later.
Click here to check out the musical’s official website.
Quote of the Day
“English should not stoop to embrace the lowest common denominator. Rather, society should step up and grant the language the respect it deserves.”
Terry Fallis, The Best Laid Plans
Terry Fallis (@TerryFallis) is a good man. He’s also a “gag man,” as they like to say in Korean, and politically savvy. Author of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour-winning novel The Best Laid Plans (2007), Mr. Fallis has a vast knowledge of Canadian politics (don’t yawn) and proves that through witty writing and an engaging plotline, even those who run for a seat in our House of Commons can be made…umm…interesting? (Yes, that was a question mark.)
For those who think the plot of The Best Laid Plans is egregiously far-fetched (a Scottish-born engineer running for Parliament with no background in politics and little interest to serve his constituents/country), I urge you to consider the case of Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
In 2011, Ms. Brosseau, who ran as a member of the (well, colour me Orange!) New Democratic Party, won the central Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinonge in the federal election by nearly 6,000 votes. That’s not the WTF part.
That came when it was discovered that the assistant manager at a university pub who was vacationing in Las Vegas during the election race, never campaigned and barely spoke French.
In any event, The Best Laid Plans is just as entertaining (and informative about la politique canadienne) as Ms. Brosseau’s rise to MP fame. At the same time, it includes some memorable lines, like the one mentioned above, as well as many & much food for thought.
unfortunately for mr falls (and wile i hole
March 9, 2017
TorStar’s 2017 Nightingale Award
In honour of my mom, a former registered nurse, I present to you the 2017 Nightingale Award.
Do you know a nurse (and registered member of the College of Ontario Nurses) who deserves to be singled out for their exceptional care and treatment of a patient(s) over the last year? If so, you have until March 16, 2017 to nominate them for the Toronto Star‘s annual Nightingale Award.
FYI, care from this nurse must have taken place between January 1, 2016 and February 28, 2017. For more information or to nominate a nurse, click here.
