The Kindle: What's it All About Amazon?

So is this future? I have to admit it's tempting. Wonder how long before the UK takes this up.



AND if you fancy self-publishing your novel, it's just a matter of click and upload.

Hmmm.

How authors can help each other on the net

Today was my concentrate-on-writing-
and-stay-off-the-internet-day. But I had to blog when I heard about author Patry Francis.

Patry Francis was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer just as her debut novel The Liar's Diary was going out in paperback. Which meant she would not be able to do the publicity work that makes or breaks most novels.

In response, author bloggers have rallied to do Francis' publicity for her, naming January 29 as Patry Francis Blog Day, with more than 300 bloggers mentioning and reviewing The Liar's Diary. The creativity and breadth of this effort is mind-blowing and inspiring. Read about it here — and look at the how well things are going on technorati!

Literary Agent Kristin Nelson comments on her blog:

Don’t ever let anyone convince you that publishing is “an every person for him or herself” industry because it’s not. There is a real community of writers and if you haven’t got connected, ask yourself why not?

Indeed. That's the power of the web for you and it's down to us authors to harness its potential.

The Patry Francis situation brings to mind YA author Siobhan Dowd (photo, left by G. Morgan) who died last year and wasn't able to promote her magnificent A Swift Pure Cry (buy it you guys!) as much as she would have liked because she was so ill. A Siobhan Dowd Trust has been set up to help disadvantaged children with their reading skills (donations are welcome here). Siobhan's next book Bog Child - which I hear is a cracker - will be published posthumously in February.

Learning from the Good, the Bad, and the Bloody Brilliant or Why We All Need Critique Groups

In an earlier incarnation as a young playwright, literary editor Sol Stein went on a writing fellowship in which he got to work with American theatre icon Thornton Wilder.

Thornton Wilder taught me ... the necessity of sitting through bad plays, to witness coughing and squirming in the audience, to have ears up like a rabbit to catch what didn't work, to observe how little tolerance an audience has for a mishap, ten seconds of boredom breaking an hour-long spell.

Solutions for Writers, Sol Stein, 1995

To this day, Stein urges his writing students

Once they have begun to master the craft, to read a few chapters of John Grisham's The Firm, or some other transient bestseller, to see what they can learn from the mistakes of writers who don't heed the precise meanings of the words they use. they also learn to read the work of literary prize-winners to detect the rare uncaught error in craft. What they are doing is perfecting their editorial eye and their self-editing talent, learning to read as a writer.

Critique groups perform this service for us. At critique groups we are learning not just to fix our work but to develop an instinctive ability to edit our own writing, the ability to see our work without the rose-tinted spectacles of a creator. We are "perfecting our editorial eye".

I wish someone told me that six years ago when I started writing. I made the mistake of listening to the advice of a (published) close friend:

Don't show your work to anyone. It will put you off writing.

But knowing what I know now, those two years of not showing my work to anybody was a complete waste of time. The fact is, writers who are put off by criticism are not cut out for publication. One only has to read the reader reviews on Amazon to realise that this writing business is not for the thin-skinned.

As Aussie Fantasy Author Ian Irvine says in his piece The Truth About Publishing:

Anyone who can be discouraged from writing should be.