Ben Tanzer's Blog, page 181

Interlude.

We Who Are About To Breed.

We are quite digging this new series from the most excellent We Who Are About To Die and the Patrick Wensink. We are also quite looking forward to participating ourselves. More soon. For real.

Bloggers. Novelists. Blogger/ Novelists. And the Alex Kudera.

TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Alex Kudera not only talks to The New Dork Review of Books about the novelist/blogger relationship, as well as, the supportive nature of the Indy writer community, but even finds a way to mention TBWCYL, Inc. spokesperson Ben Tanzer, along with quite fine authors Steve Himmer, Charles Dodd White and Lavinia Ludlow, which more or less makes it our favorite Kudera interview of the day. Big thanks brother and now for some massively self-absorbed and maybe even life-changing, for us anyway, excerpt.



Greg: Do you think breaking down the line between reviewer/blogger and author is inherently a good thing? Why or why not?

Alex: I don't see it as "inherently a good thing," but I will say that the line is already broken; maybe it's a dotted line indicating that passing is allowed? (For me, it has become exciting to see book bloggers become debut novelists.) In fact, novelists who also blog are the norm these days; if I'm not mistaken even big names like Rick Moody are blogging, and I believe that I've read it's required by Moody's publishing contract.

I see a lot of reciprocity within online writing communities, and there seems to be some sort of "you blog on me, I blog on you" expectation, and I'm very aware of a couple books I owe a read or blog to. For most of my life, I've experienced writing as a solitary act, but in the past year, I'm learning how to be a supportive part of the Indy book community — from active blogger-novelists like Ben Tanzer, Charles Dodd White, Lavinia Ludlow, and Steve Himmer (his Bee Loud Glade is also from Atticus Books).

CCLaP intersection spotlight thing Take Two - TNBBC's The Next Best Book Blog.

More CCLaP. More Fourth Anniversary celebrationess. More intersection. More Pettus. More excerpt. Just more. And yes, you might even argue that Interview Sundays are back.

Looking back, Jason shares the ever-present doubt of making it last: "There's been a pretty serious question over whether the center was going to survive at all, and even with its successes I've mostly had to wade these four years through an endless series of people wanting to tell me all the ways CCLaP was bound to fail. And that's what makes it so nice professionally as well, because the center is a literal working example, something people can literally point to, when wanting to argue, "Look, here's a person who started literally only with a donated website and $30 in business cards, and he's now published six original books that have been collectively downloaded several thousand times, and has interviewed Pulitzer nominees, and has been featured on Boing Boing twice, and once so rattled a mainstream publisher that they changed the very way they do business."
"You don't have to start with a lot of money or connections to make a big splash; that's something that I and others have been arguing for years, but it's really nice now with CCLaP to have something to literally point to and say, "And this proves it in indisputable black-and-white terms!"

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. Full of adjustments. And Turner.

The new edition of This Zine Will Change Your Life is live. We have a new poem Adjusting by Vincent Turner, which we are way excited about, and, (almost) as always, photo action from Adam Lawrence, music curation from Jason Behrends and AA Plus prose love from Pete Anderson. We hope you enjoy this edition and we appreciate all shout-outs and links. Finally, please note, we are hoping more of you will submit comix, and music, novel excerpts, and art, and video, yes, video, and combinations there of. And most finally, word-up.

CCLaP intersection spotlight thing Take One - Karen the Small Press Librarian.

With CCLaP's fourth anniversary rapidly approaching the center is receiving all sorts of well-deserved attention and adulation. In general, we couldn't be more excited about this, but we are especially excited because so much of the attention is coming from venues we quite dig, the first of which is an interview recently posted on the Karen the Small Press Librarian blog run by TBWCYL, Inc. favorite Karen Lillis. Now, how about some excerpt? Word.


How has the reception been for the e-books you've published so far? I'm not trying to single out your authors, but more to ask how you reached out and found an audience, and what you learned about how to find your readers in between Book #1 and Book #4.

When I talk to my friends who run more traditional basement presses about this subject, it looks pretty certain that in general terms, CCLaP is generating the same amount of paying customers from the ebooks as they are from their paper books, which as most people know is nothing to sneeze at but no great shakes either. The nice thing, though, is that since the ebooks are released under a "pay what you want" scheme, it means that our paying customers only make up around 25 percent of the book's total readership; and so if you're talking just about how many eyeballs the center's books are getting in front of, you can think of it in general terms of about three to four times the amount of a typical basement press. The biggest lesson I've learned so far about gathering an audience is that this stuff really does fall along traditional age lines to a great extent; so that is, whenever I publish a middle-aged author with a middle-aged audience, downloads of the electronic version are always smaller than a title by a twentysomething with a college-aged audience, even when that book will often generate the same amount of press and interest away from the internet. The adoption of ebooks is truly a generational issue, I'm slowly learning.

James Greer. Metazen. Book excerpt. Wonderbar.

New BFF and renowned author and musician James Greer has an excerpt of his new novel The Ordinary Rendition of Caeli Fax up at the always fine Metazen and we think this is most kind indeed. We also think some excerpt of said excerpt is in order. Cool? Agreed.

"It's odd, thought Caeli Fax, that at this time and in this place "hearing voices" should be a sign of mental illness. Most of history would have made of you a prophet or a poet. Most of history would have genuflected before you. Which, frankly, can become tiresome. The life of an oracle is not for me. You can't go anywhere. You have no privacy. Everyone is always asking questions. The wrong questions, or worse, questions without an answer, or with so many answers you have to just pick one at random."

This. Next week. Word. Big word.

More here. And here. And even here.

Digging this.

Remain in Light. Collin Kelley. The book trailer. Word.