Saturday, May 28, 2005

Backstory

May 24, 2005

Marianne Mancusi's Backstory

I always wanted to write a book. So one day I got a hold of a copy of 'The Writer's Market' and started looking through it. There, I found pages upon pages of publishers looking for books. I came across Harlequin and decided they looked like they'd be an easy place to get published. After all, they publish so many books, certainly they must be dying for submissions, right? " . . .


Read the rest of this article at Backstory, a great site featuring the author's story behind writing and publishing their book.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Has Book Publishing Returned to Pre-9/11 Business?

May 24, 2005
By Rachel Deahl

More books were released last year than ever before, according to a new study from R.R. Bowker. The statistics, released today, indicate U.S. publishers put out significantly more titles in 2004, jumping 14% from the previous year, to total 195,000, an all-time high for the industry. Andrew Grabois, Bowker’s director of publisher relations, says the rise points to a “return to a pre-9/11 pattern of publishing.” Grabois says the numbers point to an overall shift in the industry as publishers are now betting on the fact that the public is ready for more “escapist and self-help” fare, after being “exhausted by four years of terrorism, war, and polarizing elections.”

While the Bowker study does not reflect sales of books, and, therefore, industry revenues, it does point to the fact that there is a vast number of titles in the marketplace coming from sources other than the 12 major houses. Grabois says that, while vanity presses and POD companies make up for approximately 50,000 of the total number of titles released, the other 145,000 are coming from a combination of minor and major industry players. The Bowker study also touches on interesting trends in adult fiction, university press output, the growth of various genre categories, book pricing and translations of English titles.



Adult fiction, which accounted for 25,184 of the new titles in 2004, increased a hefty 43.1% from 2003, the highest jump ever recorded for the category. Interestingly, the large houses contributed modestly to this growth, increasing their output in the category only 3.5% from the previous year. Nonetheless, the overall growth means that adult fiction now accounts for 14% of all titles published in the country.

Grabois credits the difference in the output of adult fiction between the major houses and all other publishers with the fact that the biggest industry players are following a more conservative business model. Recognizing there might be more of a consumer interest in the category, Grabois says the major houses are still “a bit more cautious” and won’t “do a 180-degree turn in one or two seasons.”

Major trade houses released a total of 24,159 new titles, up 5.4% from 2003, Bowker reported. University presses also raised their output, releasing 14,484 titles, up 12.3% from the previous year. The strong numbers for university presses point to a turnaround in business, since the group saw a decline of 4.3% from 2002 to 2003.

Grabois says the university presses were able to turn business around by returning to their standard model, which had changed after 9/11. “[The University Presses] were hurt a lot by post-9/11 trends because they tried to gain a foothold in the trade market since there was such an interest in Afghanistan and terrorism and wound up over-publishing. They’ve cut back and now seem to be finding their sea legs again.”

Juvenile titles saw a marked rise in 2004, up 6.6% to 21,516, marking another industry high. And in the adult nonfiction category, the genres enjoying the largest increases included religion, travel and home economics. The big houses filled out their lists by releasing more titles in business, juvenile, law, sociology and travel, while cutting back markedly on religion, poetry and literary fiction.

Another decreasing area in the industry, according to Bowker, is translations of English titles; in 2004 4,040 books were translated from English into another language, a drop of 8.1% from the previous year.

As for pricing, the suggested retail price of various formats went up, for the most, with the exception of adult hardcovers, which dropped $.10 to $27.52. Adult fiction hardcovers remained the same at $25.08 while both adult trade paperbacks and adult fiction paperbacks saw a jump in price; the former rose $.11 to $15.76 and the latter climbed $.07 to $14.78.

A category seeing growth, surprisingly, is poetry, which jumped 40.5% from 2003 to 2004. Bowker, which tracks poetry and drama together, indicates that 1,779 more titles from the combined category appeared from 2003 to 2004. Despite the fact that poetry is not a big seller for the major houses, a number of POD publishers and vanity presses release a steady stream of titles in the category; Grabois estimates that poetry, drama and fiction account for 50% of the titles coming from POD and vanity presses.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Comment

'Underestimating the reading public'

‘I would say the biggest problem is underestimating the reading audience. I've always written cross-genre books: a suspense novel with a love story inside and some comedy. But publishers resisted this strenuously. Everything has to be labelled, and sold that way. If you're writing a series, there is pressure to keep things narrow and not break out. Books like Herman Wouk's The Winds of War and James Clavell's Shogun have largely disappeared from the bestseller list. The common wisdom is that readers don't have the patience they once did. But underestimating the reading public is a very big mistake. If there was more trust in the public, it would pay off. An editor once told me that if I didn't keep my vocabulary to 500 words I'd never make the best-seller list.’

Dean Koontz, who sells about 17 million copies of his books and gets over 30,000 fan letters a year, in the Wall Street Journal

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Crippled Detectives or The War of the Red Romer

I read about this story in the Village Voice. A story called, "Crippled Detectives" was written and illustrated by a 7 year old and published in a magazine called Stone Soup. The above link will take you to the story, which is supposed to be "fabulously funny." Soon after the story was published, the author was diagnosed with bipolar disease.

Defense, Prosecution Play to New 'CSI' Savvy

Apparently, jurors who watch CSI take the program too much to heart. The show has dramatically affected courtroom cases across the country. Jurors expect to see the same forensic evidence they see on TV. But in real life, forensic evidence is not always available.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

CNN.com Specials

CNN has a special report this week on forensics at 7PM ET. They also have supplementary data at their website posted above. Make no bones about it--this is definitely worth a gander for research or if you have an interest in crime detection.

So, wipe the dirt off your boots and dig in.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Would You, Could You in a Box? (Write, That Is.) - New York Times

By JULIE SALAMON

Published: May 9, 2005

The novelist Laurie Stone understood that her desire to go into the box was a symptom of something, she just didn't know of what. Ms. Stone, 58, will have a month to consider her decision from the confines of a sleek-angled structure, about 140 square feet, whose walls resemble shoji screens made not of rice paper but of translucent cellular plastic panels. Her temporary home was built just for her, in a converted factory in Queens.

On Saturday night, in front of 200 onlookers, Ms. Stone and two other novelists, ensconced in neighboring pods, embarked on a variation of the spectator sports made familiar by reality television. Ms. Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie are the participants in "Novel: A Living Installation" at the Flux Factory, an artists' collective in Long Island City. The goal is for each to complete a novel by June 4. The purpose is to consider the private and public aspects of writing.

No cameras will record this voyeuristic experiment, though visitors can peep occasionally (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m). The potential for public humiliation comes not from the perils of constant surveillance, but from the more familiar writers' problem of failing to meet a deadline. Make that deadlines. They will give weekly readings of their works in progress on Saturdays at 8 p.m., and take part in two public discussions scheduled for this coming Sunday and May 22.

What the novelists write is not as important as how they live while they are writing. Each habitat was designed by builders who, like the writers, entered a competition. The writers can emerge for only 90 minutes a day and must record on time cards the reason for their absence (laundry, bathroom, snacks). Each evening they will gather together to eat a meal cooked by a chef from a local restaurant.

For the Flux Factory curators, the exhibition (or exhibitionism) is an extension of an experiment their group has been conducting for a decade. Seventeen of the mostly youthful Fluxers, as they call themselves, live in the Flux Factory, a 7,500-square-foot space, which has the trappings of a college commune. ("Novel" is in the 2,000 square feet set aside for exhibitions.) The Fluxers' mission is to constantly consider the relationship between life and art, a process oiled by grant money.

The idea for "Novel" came to Morgan Meis, 32, a founder and the president of Flux Factory, as he was trying to finish his dissertation on the Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, and his theories of experience. "I said I should do a project called 'Dissertation' where I lock myself in a box" and just finish the thing, Mr. Meis said.

Instead, he staged this show, together with Kerry Downey, 25, a fellow Fluxer. They put out notices on various Web sites, at graduate schools and architecture firms. Two hundred writers and a dozen designers applied.

With no money at stake and little prospect for celebrity, why did the writers, all past the age of youthful impulse, decide to participate?

Ms. Stone, a trim, lively woman with stylish short hair, was drawn by the isolation. "The idea of escaping from TV, all media, was very appealing to me," she said, in an interview before the experiment began. She came with the essentials: books, makeup and linens. Her main worry was that she would not adjust well to living in such close proximity with strangers. "I'm afraid I won't be flexible," she said, "I won't be happy. I'll be rigid and terrified."

The writing and reading aspect did not alarm her. "What's the worst that can happen?" she asked, and laughed. "I'll be terrible and give a bad reading. I'm extremely experienced with that."

Mr. Bailie, 43, had different motives. He received some fine reviews for his first novel, "Cloud 8," published in 2002, but earns a living as a security supervisor for an office complex and mall in downtown Cleveland. Mr. Bailie, who paid for his plane ticket to New York, also has a wife and two children from a previous marriage, so his writing time is limited.

"I could write a better book if I were locked up for a while," he said Saturday night at the party that preceded his semiseclusion, which began minutes after 9 o'clock. Mr. Bailie, dressed in all-black for the occasion, said he was not nervous. "But then, I've had a few beers," he added.

His space resembled a cross between a rustic hut and a primitive ship's cabin (but with electrical outlets). Its designer, Ian Montgomery, 24, is a carpenter and fine arts graduate of Bard College who has lived at the Flux Factory for eight months. In keeping with the Fluxers' experimental gestalt, Mr. Montgomery, with a mop of curly hair and a beard, wore a casual black dress over his jeans. Barefoot as he navigated his creation, he explained why he had decided to include a "grow table," a board covered with dirt sprouting wheat germ, clover and rye.

"I'm really interested in the potential energy that can be exerted in a short amount of time by plants and writers," he said.

The third writer, Mr. Sidhu, 38, moved to California from India when he was 13, and has lived in New York for seven years. He was looking for freelance work when he saw an ad for the project on Craig's List. "This seemed so much more interesting," he said. "The business models are consolidating and making publishing narrower and narrower, whereas this breaks open that model through play, refocusing on what's really important, which is the writing itself."

Mr. Sidhu will be living in an airy space defined by various boxes and movable plexiglass walls designed by two graduate architecture students at Columbia University, Mitch McEwen and Kwi-Hae Kim.

Paul Davis, one of the architects who designed Ms. Stone's abode, had been up all night adding the finishing touches and was still attaching panels with a staple gun an hour before Ms. Stone secluded herself.

Mr. Davis, 43, has sleek good looks that seem more suited to a martini ad than a warehouse art-happening. His firm, Salazar Davis, mostly does fancy residential and retail jobs, with clients that include Agnès B. and Air America radio.

He said he loved his break from the functional: "It was fun to remove ourselves from the practical business of selling something and be set loose to explore the ramifications of what it is to inhabit a place."

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Anne Rice Gets Biblical in Her Next Book - Yahoo! News

Anne Rice Gets Biblical in Her Next Book Sat May 7,10:06 AM ET

NEW YORK - Vampires are usually her passion, but Anne Rice is getting biblical in her next book, due out in November from publisher Random House. "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" will tell the story of Jesus' early years in his own words.

Excerpts of a lengthy letter that will accompany advance review copies of the book this summer are published in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine.

"For over 10 years I've wanted to do this book — Jesus in his own words," Rice writes. "For five years, I've been obsessed with how to do it, and for the last three years I've been consumed with nothing else."

Rice, who has moved from New Orleans to San Diego, brought the undead back to life in the 1970s with "Interview With the Vampire."

"I'm not a priest," Rice also writes in the letter. "I can't be one. I'll never be able to go to the altar of the Lord and say the words of consecration at Mass, `This is my body. This is my blood.' No, I can't work that magnificent Eucharistic miracle. But in humility, I have attempted something transformative which we writers dare to call a miracle in the imperfect human idiom we possess. It's to bring Him here in the form a story, and that story is Christ The Lord."

Friday, May 06, 2005

Fight over finger found in custard

The man that discovered the finger in his custard refuses to "hand" it over to authorities.

Read all about it by clicking on the title link.