Need a creative kick in the head? Read this bit from David Bayles' ART & FEAR

From Art & Fear by David Bayles:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right side solely on the its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scale and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". 

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Buy the book.  

Meet the League of Extraordinary Authors

Blues Bros approach to indie publishing: Shake Your Tail Feather

PW was tweeting live and collaborative notes were emerging on hackpad during a panel discussion on indie publishing at SXSW earlier this week. I was happy to see the notes reflect the most important point I made during the whole discussion:

"What sells a book sells a book, same in traditional or self-publishing. You gotta shake your tail feathers."

 

Social networking for the antisocial

People keep pushing this whole agenda of auto-tweeting as a way to game the Amazon ranks, and I know it works. You do sell books, but... do you still have time to write books? (Do you still have a soul?) I get that twitter is about "building relationships," I'm just not clear on the quality of a relationship based on spam.

My thought all along has been to use twitter with a less aggressive stance, using hashtags to insert my two cents into a conversation that actually interests me.

Like this:

For women in the 60s, life began at #contraception. BT Sissel on the bad old #aspirin days. http://bit.ly/xctmgF

I've been assured that this is pointless. But I remain hopeful that "teachable moment" marketing that links the right message with the right moment has an effect that is perhaps less obviously and instantly measurable but ultimately more powerful, because it's about building a culture instead of a terribly impressive house of cards.

Twitter is an insanely great idea, and it's a powerful marketing tool, but it requires a certain personality type, and I'm not sure that's me. Does that mean I won't sell books? Maybe. I'm sure it means I won't sell as many. And at the end of the day, authors want to put their books in readers' hands.

So I'm determined to give it a shot.

I'll start by implementing this list of 5 Twitter Secrets to Become Highly Visible in Your Niche, one each day this week. Next, I'll take a crash course in Book Marketing 101 from World Lit Cafe founder, Melissa Foster.

Just in case, I bought the T-shirt.

Is Amazon the Death of Literary Culture?

JA Konrath always puts me off with his blowhard tone, but everything he says in his blog post, "Amazon Will Destroy You" is pretty much on target.

A powerful example of the attitude he's decrying can be found here: Six Degrees Left: Is Amazon the Death of Literary Culture?

Here's my response to that dialogue (I guess you could say I'm "Konrath lite"):

Thank you for this extremely interesting conversation, in which — for my taste — Laura Ellen Scott stands out as the voice of reason. (Aside to LES: Drop the Kindle in a Ziploc bag for bathtub reading.)

Since my first novel was pubbed by a wonderful literary press (now called MacAdam-Cage) in the mid-90s, I’ve done over a dozen Big 6 books as an author and ghostwriter. During that time, I watched fiction acquisitions become increasingly constipated, while nonfiction acquisitions became increasingly obsessed with celebrity, and creative writing majors were pumped out of grad school with not a clue about how to make a living writing — creatively or otherwise.

For all the hand-wringing about the fate of booksellers, I heard very little concern for those of us who’ve dedicated our lives to the creation of books. It never seemed to occur to anyone that the health of literary culture might be maybe possibly kinda related to the health of authors.

My first Kindle breathed new life into my reading; 20 years of writing has taken a serious toll on my eyesight. First, I consumed all my favorite classics and loved them more than ever. Then I started working my way through recently ballyhooed fiction, and I’m sorry to say it, but I was bored out of my effing skull.

So I started digging into some of the works being indie/self-pubbed on KDP. Not the 99 cent mosh pit. (I believe the 99 cent price tag was brought to the publishing industry by amateurs, the way sailors brought syphilis to Hawaii. Those who introduced it had a great time; those who live with the legacy, not so much. The gold rush will end by 2013, I think, as readers click to the reality that most of the .99/free books are crap.)

I read JEWBALL by the hilarious Neal Pollack; THE DEADWOOD BEETLE, a gorgeous, long out of print, literary novel by Mylene Dressler; THE VOLUNTEER by Barbara Taylor Sissel, an amazing voice who refused to make the compromises that would have made her novels easy grist for the traditional mill; THE LONG DRUNK by Eric Coyote, whose agent believed in the author’s quirky brilliance but never quite managed to get this bordering-on-Henry-Miller, reprobate-noir novel past the gatekeepers.

Left to the wisdom of “book culture” and indie booksellers, not one of these novels would be available to readers today. This is what Amazon hath wrought: authors allowed to push the artistic envelope, readers allowed to think for themselves, a democratized literary ecosystem.

Last year, I started a digital imprint to indie pub e-editions of my out of print backlist, and it went so well, I recently pubbed my latest novel myself. This year, I started forming a coalition of seasoned, professional authors who are stepping off the edge of the map to create a new brand of literary career that hybridizes the best qualities of indie and traditional publishing.

We’re maintaining and building relationships with agents and publishers, but we’re our own gatekeepers now. We hold to the importance of traditional editing and professionalism, but now we have creative freedom we never had, because traditional publishers can no longer afford to take the creative risks we’re prepared to take. And they never could afford to pay 70% royalties.

This revolution was inevitable. It is exhilarating to me, as both a reader and a writer. And it’s the healthiest thing to happen to literary culture since Gutenberg.