John Locke, the author- not the LOST character-though both have pretty amazing stories, has recently signed a distribution and sales of print only deal with Simon and Schuster (who seem to be all over the board this month).

Is this the end of traditional publishing as we know it? Or an exciting pre-eminent takeover by authors?

Locke was the first self-published author to sell a million e-books through his own company. Which pretty much tells us he knows what he’s doing. And now, with this deal… he’s kind of a hero around here.

Kudos to his agent, Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, who handled the deal.

Locke-ism for the day: “When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them … Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.

Last night my daughter told me that I could start my own used book store with all the books I have on my shelves.

I laughed, then wondered again, about storage for my darling hardcovers, all those signed and first editions- books that I imagine will be called “antiques” before I die.

I know publishing is a changing industry. I accept that. I bought my Kindle, and shopping for tablets, read downloaded material all the time.

I even have my own e-book at all the retail outlets.

Simple Intent

* on sale for the next fews days at a discounted rate of $4.99

Though I still buy books in all forms, I must admit, the nights of wrestling with a 600 page hardback book while trying to get comfortable in bed, only to have it bonk you on the bridge of your nose when you fall asleep… won’t be missed.

As the reviews on my ebook, Simple Intent come out. I begin to wonder what it would sound like if I wrote a review on my latest reads… and then I wonder why don’t I?
I think it’s a matter of time, and of space. How can I tell you that one book made me immeasurably sad but not why, and yet another made me angry and the last one? Although a raving success out in the world… I could not and have not finished it.
sigh.

thanks to this reviewer: who read and liked my e-book..

The first e-book offering from little old me.

Yep. I did it. It wasn’t traditional. It wasn’t even my favorite book. I know, you shouldn’t say that. But I have become filterless in the last short while… beware the “f” bomb, people.

I blame it on the world. I am, like most writers filled with doubt about the publishing world- the book as we once knew it is probably changing forever. And along with that, is the way we acquire, market and buy both the author and the book.

So what’s a girl to do? Give up her dream? Stand there and just take it? Nope. Not my style. I have been patient. I have been understanding, forgiving and kind. Ask my agent.*

I believe there is “the right time” for everything, but seriously… does it take 4 months for an editor to reply? I know I always think I can do something better than the guy in charge, but imagine this… an email comes in. You read the query.  You say, nope. not for me. you reply. You delete, and repeat. A pitch comes from an agent, you like it, you request manu.  She sends it, you skim, trust your gut. Offer or decline. Done. Next?

Don’t even get me started on the army of marketers and accountants it takes to push a manuscript into book form. Or the way most people only read what they find listed on a BOGUS best-seller list. ANd please, we do not want to talk about the way some writers are more magic web masters and salespeople than wordsmiths.

ARGH.

Let’s just say, I want to keep writing novels, even if no one ever reads them. Even if I have to buy the whole stock myself and fly around the world reading chapters to blind people . I want to believe in the power of words, be sucked into the imagery of a place I will never go nor have never been. I want to be responsible for taking one person out of their reality and dropping them smack into a place from my dream. I want to mess with your head and I want you to love me for it.

Well, there. that’s why we write. For love. Or… to annoy the shit out of you.

I do both.

*note to agent   forgive my candor…now go pitch We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning, and 3 Women Walk into a Bar

From The Writer’s Almanac: January 25th

It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, (books by this author) born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era. Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts. She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. That moved her to write her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.” It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” and “Should auld acquaintance be forgot, / And never brought to mind?” and “O my luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June; O my luve’s like the melodie / That’s sweetly played in tune.” That’s the “Bard of Ayrshire,” the ploughman poet, Robert Burns, (books by this author) born 251 years ago today in Alloway, Scotland (1759). Today people in Scotland and groups all over the world are holding Burns suppers to celebrate his life and work. They read Burns’ poems, sing his songs, eat haggis, and drink lots of whiskey.

I found and joined the Facebook group, Naked Girls Reading, without really knowing what it was, only that I was one of them. I admit. I read in bed. I’ll also admit, I don’t always wear pajamas.

But wait, read on.

This is a live reading series, where totally buck naked- not even a pasty- they claim. beautiful Burlesque dancing women read from banned books.

“Pinchbottom Burlesque debuted Naked Girls Reading Banned Books at Madame X on Friday, October 16. It was hosted by Nasty Canasta, with Gal Friday, GiGi La Femme, Jo Boobs, Legs Malone, Sapphire Jones and Naked Girls Reading creator, Michelle L’Amour. ”

I know. Great, isn’t it?

Now, I’d love to see some audience reaction photos.

Here, “Nasty Canasta reads And Tango Makes Three, the true story of Silo and Roy, a male penguin couple in the Central Park Zoo. The American Library Association deemed it the most banned book of 2009 and most challenged book of 2006 – 2008.”

Burlesque gets smart-assed.

God, I love New York.

I haven’t found the book I went looking for the last three trips to Barnes And Noble.

I barely found an intelligent clerk to help me not find the book that they didn’t carry but would be happy to order for me. WHAT?

I know, I know. I should be supporting my independent bookstore, and I do frequent the small used book store around the corner, have even ordered new books from them, but sometimes, you’re in the mall, thirsty for coffee and a plush green chair, and well… you succumb.

But after the coffee, the internet usage and the browsing of the free magazine, I’ll probably leave without a book and a new frown line on the forehead. I live outside a pretty major city, that, while it’s not on the big publisher book tour route, still gets its share of writers passing through. This is the south after all.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the poorly stocked shelves at the Mall of Georgia’s Barnes and Noble.

Thank goodness for my Kindle and the ever so ready at 5AM Amazon.com, where shopping in pajamas is encouraged.

From PUBLISHER’S LUNCH
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble can’t catch a break from Wall Street analysts no matter what they do. On Friday Credit Suisse reduced their target price for the company to $16 per share (about two dollars below its current price), while Goldman Sachs downgraded their rating from neutral to sell. In contrast, Amazon’s shares rose 26 percent for the day following their better-than-expected earnings report.
BN’s stock has suffered a number of blows in the past months. First Wall Street looked down on the BN College acquisition as focused on the legacy print business, and in recent days the bestseller price war hasn’t helped. (The company is sitting this battle out–which protects margins, but may give up market share.)
Now with the announcement of nook, the company has been downgraded for what analysts see as a successful ebook strategy. Credit Suisse writes, “while we applaud management for these efforts and think it has the potential to be a major player in this business, the concern is whether being a player will ultimately sacrifice profitability. The risk, in our view, is that as the math currently works, each sale through a Nook is not just unprofitable but potentially replaces a higher margin sale at stores.” CS opines that “the eReader push will actually be incremental to sales in the near term,” but sees that success eroding in-store results over time.
It’s all a series of hypothetical extrapolations about the behavior of ebook readers in the coming years, and notably CS doesn’t make any projections for additive business for Barnes & Noble in selling to other devices (like iRex and Plastic Logic’s Que); taking a role as the leading vendor of EPUB books for multiple devices; driving ereading business in the college market; or sales of newspapers, magazines, blogs and other high-margin ereading materials. In other words, the numbers leave a lot of room for hypothesis–and interpretation.
But in a morning when the market is up broadly, BN shares started sliding again today–though not as much as Borders, which was down more than 5 percent.
On the same theme but from a different vantage point, Mike Shatzkin looks at financial and structural changes caused by the ereading transition as everyone adjusts to “a smaller print-book business”: “Publishers are going to have to rethink their operations. Sales staffs will probably contract; warehouse space will become redundant; investments in IT systems for the print operation will have to be more rigorously controlled. Publishers will likely combine, of course; the big houses now all gladly take competing publishers into their back office operations to help support them. But downward shifts in scale are not only inevitable, they will probably happen in more dramatic lurches than we’ve known in the past.
“Wholesalers and distributors will both win and lose in this shift, but the shape of their business will certainly change. On the one hand, they, like everybody else, will lose sales that they have today because accounts go under and publishers they distribute cease operating. On the other hand, they are in the business of converting fixed operating costs to variable ones, and the number of customers for that proposition will grow as the apparent costs of operations (as a percentage of sales) get out of control at many companies.”

I read this in The New Yorker and think the charity contribution part is brilliant. I have attended many book launches where they request a donation to a charity that is linked to the book’s theme or a character in the book.

When I finished writing We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning, I began thinking about marketing, about tie-ins about media… this is all part of the business. The part we’re not supposed to think about while writing, and yet…

I have begun searching for charities in Savannah, charities related to literacy, book provision, education, and even joined a few lighthouse restoration groups. This type of  donation, of awareness, acts as dual marketing, and maybe in the end is more proactive that merely tithing 10% to your church.

Here’s the article:

by Thom Geier

This was fun, though they sort of got the thing wrong.
It wasn’t about me.
It was about a whole bunch of new talented writers.

It was about scratch.

contributors, see their bios

We’ve only been around online since February of 2008 and debuted the annual anthology this past June.

be in the next one: scratchcontest.net

We had a really fun night, and pretty good crowd for a bunch of unknowns. We never expected to get rich or famous- I think I’m speaking for all the contributors, but the idea of small press journals of short fiction is to get your author publication credits, to get your name out there, to build a following and to pump up the solitary writer’s ego- at least a little bit.

Compared to this VERY big festival, I realized two things. More planning, emails, marketing, begging and wine is needed when selling a virtually unknown book.
We came up with a lot of great promotion ideas, fueled by Belgium beer and Margaritas and will kick some serious butt next year. Watch out Hotlanta!

Besides being there to promote scratch. I had fun talking some of my favorite writers and meeting some new ones, like Sara Gruen.

Michael Malone and Robert Olen Butler on a panel that was so hot, someone fainted.

Unlike prior festivals, this post will not be peppered with pictures of me with authors signing my books. Of course, I bought books, and of course went to panels and stood in line and got my books signed- some for my sister Patti’s Birthday gifts! But, I guess I’ve finally reached that Literary Groupie status where everyone who was there that I was interested in, I’d already met. Man, that sounds like I get around.

There was a little lull time on Sunday afternoon to take the Marta over to Dragon*Con.

There is never a dull moment there. From architecture that blew away a Brooklynite

to potent Margaritas served with the creatures of Alice in Wonderland. We had our glass elevator ride and shot some film

before hurrying back to the other side of town, where the lit set were winding down with a picnic.

A few days of this kind of living, and I was almost ready to go home. Almost.

Certainly could have done without the false fire alarm at the hotel after 3 bottles of wine and a very large Belgium beer… but the rest of it?

The rest of is something to write about, until next year that is.