Peter J Murray's inspiring story

Someone mentioned Peter J Murray's website on one of the message boards I follow and I casually followed the links to this video which tells how Murray went from being self published to a three book deal. The most impressive thing in this video is Murray performing during at schools. The man is an inspiration!

If you can't see the video, view it here

An 'Overnight Success' after 20 years

The excellent Undiscovered Voices website was launched yesterday and I urge all you hopefuls to read David Almond's essay about his struggle to be discovered:

All writers, unless they’re very fortunate, know how difficult it is to get noticed, to become ‘discovered’. I became an ‘overnight success’ (I clapped when I read the review that said it) after almost twenty years: stories in obscure little magazines; a couple of story collections published by a tiny northeastern press; a novel rejected by every single UK publisher; a couple of dozen readers who loved my work; a part of me that said it all would work out well; and another part that simply didn’t give a damn. I wrote because I loved to write, and I’d keep on writing no matter how much recognition I received. Read it all

Last night, winners of last year's ground-breaking Undiscovered Voices competition rubbed shoulders with hopefuls for the next one, which will be published in 2010. The deadline for entries is June 1 2009. Winners will be announced in the fall of 2009.

The previous competition has been a big learning curve, say organisers Sara O Connor and Sara Grant, as a result of which the rules have changed. The biggest change is that agented authors cannot enter while non-fiction authors can. Read the submission rules here.

Apart from Lindsay Heaven, commissioning editor of Puffin, 2010's panel of judges are brand spanking new. The judges are:

JULIA CHURCHILL, The Greenhouse Literary Agency
LINDSEY HEAVEN, Puffin Books
SARAH MANSON, Literary Agent
JO UNWIN, Conville and Walsh
EMMA YOUNG, Macmillan Children’s Books
ZOE DUNCAN, Scholastic Children’s Books

Left to right,Sarah Manson, Zoe Duncan, Jo Unwin, Emma Young, and Julia Churchill

Several people have asked me if my writing life has been happily ever after since I made it into the first anthology.

The answer is: winning the anthology was like getting fast-tracked to the next level. You bypass the slushpile. Which is fabulous. Yes, it has changed my life and yes, the future is bright.

The thing is, you get up to the next level and you realise that you have entered another battle. And you wonder when you will ever win the war?

I am writing my fourth novel now and I still don't know which one will be my first published novel. At last night's event, people were still congratulating me for that  glorious moment two years (!) ago now. A moment that now seems all too fleeting. 

I take heart from David Almond's words:

And through it all, through all the doubts and humiliations, we have to open up a little space inside ourselves in which a little fragment of ourselves can sit still and whisper, ‘It’s OK.’

Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away

I'm a Google enthusiast, I admit it. I've switched from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Google Chrome. I enjoy Google Earth. I use Google Docs. I use Google Maps. I run Google Adwords. I blog on Google's Blogger.

But for every wonderful thing Google giveth, Google taketh away. 

Today, literary agent Lynn Chu of Writers Representatives took a microscope to the labyrinthine terms of the recent Google settlement and spelled it out in language even an author can understand .

Chu warns authors to pay attention (all authors who've ever had anything published in the United States) -

(by 5 May 2009) ... every author and publisher in America is supposed to decide whether to "opt in," "opt out," or simply "ignore" a vast compulsory licensing scheme for the benefit of Google.

Given that authors are notorious at procrastination, I am helpfully bullet-pointing the highlights of the article below. But do read the complete article in the Wall Street Journal  titled 'Google's Book SettlementIs a Ripoff for Authors: Why allow a single publisher to throw out a functioning copyright system?'. 

• who are the winners of the settlement? the lawyers get $30 million, the Book Rights Registry gets $ 35 million, and infringed authors? $ 60 a book.
  
  
• "every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs"
  
  
• The Book Rights Registry - Says Chu:

  The Internet was supposed to eliminate middlemen, not pack multiple layers on. The BRR is in fact merely Google's contract negotiation and claims department

  • "Google's erstwhile adversaries are paid off with the aforementioned Book Rights Registry (BRR), which will compete with the U.S. Copyright Office and the federal courts"
  
  
  • "The BRR expects to read everyone's contracts to say who is owed what of Google's revenues -- net again of all its costs, which are sure to be huge"
  
  
• "The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out -- just for Google. But U.S. law does not grant any single publisher monopoly power to herd all of us into its list"

Meanwhile, several authors have suddenly woken up to the realisation that books are fair game to the piracy that has previously plagued other media.

Publishers and agents representing the authors J. K. Rowling and Ken Follett were battling last night to get free copies of their novels removed from a Californian website that claims to be the most popular literary site in the world. Read More

Scribd.com has earned the dubious title of the "YouTube for books".

I kind of disagree with Liu's point that the current copyright system is good enough. 

I think it's under siege.

Add: Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency posted this advice