Most of you have heard this by now, but Dorchester is switching from mass market to e-book and print on demand. Dorchester President John Prebich said: “These are like pioneer times in publishing. We felt like we needed to take some chances and make a bold move.”
Since the initial announcement, there’s been some confusion and backtracking.
New D4EO agent Weronika Janczuk is interested in women’s fiction but not chick lit.
Normally Penguin Books only looks at agented submissions, but for a limited three-month period, from the beginning of August until the end of October 2010, they’ll accept submissions sent electronically to the following address: submissions. You can find out more here.
Angela James from Carina Press gives stats of their submissions and says one of the genres they’re looking for is contemporary romance. In the comments, editor Deborah Nemeth says she’s also open to women’s fiction.
Need help showing emotion? Scroll down the right sidebar of The Bookshelf Muse and you’ll see an Emotion Thesaurus. Click on the emotion beneath it that you want to show. Here are just a few from the site for Enthusiasm:
· Rushed words, bubbly or loud tone
· Eyes that sparkle, glow, are wide, have a happy intensity
· Rapt attention
· Talking over people, monopolizing conversation, using lots of excitable language
· Grabbing onto people (arm, hand, etc) and squeezing to transfer/display hyper feelings
· Repeating self
· Nervous pacing, fidgeting, impatient if forced to wait
· Extrovert behavior: shouting, jumping up and down, waving, calling out to others
· Bouncing on toes
Here’s another cool site, The Grimace Project. Move your mouse around and see the emotional changes on the cartoon face and the list of emotions on the right. I can spend too much time on this page.
Dean Wesley Smith talks about the changes in publishing and the benefits for writers.
“For decades I have been telling new writers to just write what they want to write, what makes them passionate, what makes them angry, what makes them happy. But often, in the real world of traditional publishing, those passionate books would not sell or be labeled “hard sells” and end up in drawers and the writer discouraged.
No more. Writers now have a lot of different ways for readers to find and discover their work beyond traditional publishing routes. And more opening up by the day.”
Another thought-provoking blog by Smith in which he says Books Are No Longer Produce.
“In the last twenty years, publishers with computer tracking and stores with computer tracking took the importance of book as event a little too far. Books that were what are called “Word of Mouth” books, or slow builds, never really stood a chance in this thinking. If you didn’t find a book in the first week or the first month, look in a used bookstore or lately in a used store online to find it. Because no regular store would still have it.
And author backlists were a thing of the past unless you were a brand name bestseller.”
But with electronic publishing, that’s changing:
“Readers who never ever thought of books as produce are now being allowed to find authors and books easier with this new world of electronic communication and reading. And that’s what has changed.”
I learned a few things reading the fifth post from Carrie Spencer at Romance University on WordPress for Non-Techies. Great posts for anyone who has a WordPress blog or website, or is thinking of putting one up.
The recently launched online Wylie Library sounds impressive.
“Wiley Online Library offers integrated access to more than 4 million articles from 1,500 journals, 9,000 books, and hundreds of reference works and databases. Built on the latest technology,Wiley Online Library is an entirely new service that enhances discoverability and fosters collaboration…”
POD books while you wait will soon be here.
“By the time 2011 rolls around, Nolita’s McNally Jackson Books will have an Espresso Book Machine, the Xerox-like on-demand device that prints a fully bound book in mere minutes.”
I’ll leave you with a great Novelists Inc. blog by a best-selling Kindle writer.
