The biggest news for RWA members this last week is the change of location for the National conference from Nashville to The Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, July 28–31.
According to the NY Times, self-publishing numbers are up and they’re gaining in cachet.
Cheap, digital-publishing technology — especially print-on-demand options, which let individual buyers essentially commission copies of books — has been a godsend to writers without agents or footholds at traditional publishing houses. It has also been a quiet godsend to literary history. Books that defy traditional classification now appear in print, and reprints of public-domain titles account for the biggest category of self-published books.
Change isn’t coming, according to the Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay conference, it’s already here.
“St. Martin’s Press v-p and associate publisher Matt Baldacci said the point of no return came to him last year when a bestseller that eventually sold 30,000 copies in hardcover sold 11,000 e-book copies within the first few weeks of release.”
In this Media Bistro interview, agent Meredith Bernstein says “many editors have told me that they are looking for really good women’s fiction.”
“What I am looking for is pretty much always the same thing: A BOOK I CAN’T PUT DOWN. I really don’t care what the subject matter is or the genre or the setting. Just give me a STORY and CHARACTERS that I want to inhale and you’ll have me at “hello”!”
Taylor Martindale joined Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. One of her interests is women’s fiction.
Donald Maass mentioned RWA-WF member Susan Wiggs in his recent Writer Unboxed post this week, in which he talked about using multiple point of view to give depth to a novel and “to create a true sense of scale.”
Whether you’ve gotten rejections lately or not, this list of 30 famous authors whose works were (repeatedly and rudely) rejected is interesting.
self publishing is kind of difficult at first, but you can easily learn the tricks of the trade :’,