Archive
Monthly Archives: April 2011
- by Tara Maya
Blurbs!
The Scoop on Blurbs by Cindy Jones, My Jane Austen Summer
How to Get Blurbs for Your Book by Shennadoah Diaz
Dear Sir or Madam (Use your prospect’s real name—no mass letters here):
I admire your book/s [Title], so when I knew it was time to start requesting endorsements for my forthcoming book [Title], you were at the top of my list.
Like yours, my book is [genre x]. Description and tag line about the book.
To help with your decision, I have enclosed an Advance Reader’s Copy and sample endorsements for you to review. I thank you very much for your time and look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Author
Six writers tell all about covers and blurbs doesn’t give much advice about blurbs, but certainly casts a harsh neon glow on some of the less savory aspects of traditional publishing — like the complete powerlessness of the author to change a cover she hates, and the power of Nameless Suits, at the last minute, and for no apparent reason, to take away a cover she loves.
Scalzi’s blurb policy and tips from a guest on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
Many authors have tales of woe to tell about trying to solicit or evade being solicited for blurbs. They speak of heartfelt humiliation, degradation and guilt. But the best blurb story of all is from the author of Praying for Sheetrock
Twenty years ago, as I searched for blurbs for SHEETROCK, I didn’t know my children were watching. I hadn’t assumed it made an impression on anyone. But one spring evening in 1991, I was caught in a vast gridlock of rush-hour traffic on Buford Highway with three Girl Scouts, including nine-year-old Molly, in the backseat.
We sat bumper-to-bumper for two, five, ten minutes, in a sea of motionless traffic, while a traffic light went from green to red, to green, to red on the horizon, and a rush-hour pan-handler began working the lanes of cars. This man had a plastic bucket and a piece of cardboard with him. He tapped on drivers’ windows and showed them his cardboard, which probably explained that he was homeless. The three little girls in the backseat followed his progress.
“What is that man doing?” asked one of the Girl Scouts. I opened my mouth to explain the concept of “panhandling,” but before I could get a word out, Molly offered: “I’m pretty sure he’s trying to get blurbs for his new book.”
- by Tara Maya
A Tale of Two Email Folders
On my hard drive, I have a place I archive old mail. I have a number of folders organized by type of mail. One folder is titled, “Queries.” By the whim of alphanumeric order, the folder, titled “Reviews” falls right below it.
As I was sorting mail, I accidentally clicked on the wrong folder, and opened an old letter from Queries. It began, “Thank you for sending me your mss, but I’m afraid I just didn’t love it.”
Oops. It was a letter from one of the many, many agents I had queried once upon a time.
I clicked the right folder, the right letter. From a reviewer. “Thank you for sending me your book. I LOVED it!”
Same book. A year later.
Life is sweet.
- by Tara Maya
The Grad Student and the Fairy
A parable with Amazon Associate links. 😉
One evening a grad student working on her Master’s degree was studying alone in the library, nodding off over an impenetrable tome of postmodernist literary theory, probably something by Butler
He searched the stacks with increasing alarm as the tiny plea grew more desperate, then sputtered into a scream of pain.
At last he saw it…a big, ugly rat, dragging a little pixie girl by the ankle. The rat was as fat as the hardcover edition of Of Grammatology
The grad student, quick of wit, grabbed Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach
“Thank you, thank you!” she cried. She fluttered in the air and alighted upon The Judgment of Paris
The grad student thought long and hard. He was pretty tempted to go for sexy. But he was, after all, an academic.
“Please make me the wisest man on Earth,” he asked the fairy.
She aimed her magic wand. Light burst everywhere and he had to close his eyes.
When he opened them, all which had been obscure to him before, he now saw clearly, without illusion and without bias.
“Damn,” he said. “So I should I have gone for the money.”
* * *
🙂
In other words…I’ll be busy with grad school this week, so I probably won’t have much time to blog. Unless I choose to write blog posts to procrastinate doing my schoolwork. Like this post, for example.
Meanwhile, if you have a self-publishing emergency, try dialing this operator. When she asks you, “Which do you want more, sir? The prestige or the money?” just remember the Parable of the Grad Student and the Fairy.
- by Tara Maya
An Agent Reflects on Ebooks and Gatekeeping
Agent Jenny Bent ruminates on the difference between being a gatekeeper vs a conduit.
An agent friend and I were e-mailing today about “reader taste” vs. “publisher taste.” I think I’ve always had a case of “reader taste” because many of the books that I’ve really loved I’ve had a tough time selling or sold for very little money. Yet most of them have gone on to do very well indeed, many of them hitting the Times list. I would list them, but I’m not sure the authors would appreciate me telling the world that their book was hard to sell. Regardless, I loved these books, and I knew readers would love these books, but publishers often weren’t so sure, probably because the books were considered “quiet,”i.e., not “high concept,” or because they were aimed at readers in Middle America, or because they were quirky and hard to categorize.
Look, I don’t want to be too hard on editors and publishers. We’re all doing our best, after all, and publishing will always be something of a crap shoot, because we can’t really afford to do market research (except for Harlequin) and rely on guesswork to make pretty major decisions about what to publish and promote. When publishers are “running numbers” to decide how much money they can afford to spend on a book, a big part of the process is comparing the book to another book that is similar, and then factoring in the sales figures of said book. Sound unscientific? You betcha.
She then adds:
I guess the reason that I can’t help being a little gleeful about the democratization of the process, is that what I dislike about publishing is less the *way* we make decisions but rather the attitude that sometimes–not always–goes into those decisions, this somewhat patronizing, East Coast urban attitude of knowing better than the rest of book-reading America. And the idea that a book must appeal to a certain kind of sophisticated east coast reader to be successful.
Both the entire post and the comments are worth reading.
- by Tara Maya
Strunk and White Revisited
Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.
– Strunk and White, p.69
For my academic course, we’ve been asked to revisit some of the Classics of Good Writing. Strunk and White. Bird by Bird. I’ve read both before, of course, but haven’t re-read them in ages, and it was good to do so. I remembered endless rules for commas in Strunk and White, as it turns out an exaggeration of my memory. This time I merely skimmed the grammar rules, which I know, or know to look up if I need them. Instead, I enjoyed the essay on style. Even more than what Strunk and White said, I enjoyed how they said it, how they demonstrated in writing what they demanded of writing.
TECHNICAL NOTE: Nooksters, I do not know what the problem is with Initiate and Taboo going up on the nook. My Tech Guy uploaded them for me, but the administration page still says, “Processing.” It’s been over a week, clearly something is not processing correctly. Even my Tech Guy is baffled, and we may have to appeal directly to B&N to figure out what the problem is. Sorry for the delay!
- by Tara Maya
If you shop at B&N be careful
If you shop at Barnes & Noble, be careful, it was one of many large corporations that suffered a huge theft of identities lately.
You can read more here.