Showing category "Libels & Wickedness" (Show all posts)
 How do you sell a novel?
That’s the number one problem for every self-publishing author and it
probably accounts for all the other numbers too. Unless your novel
sells, you may well be a writer but you’re not a novelist. Here are four
ways that don’t work.
1. Banner ads don’t work.
Many
sites will sell you a banner, in a choice of sizes, to promote your
book and each at a fancy price. None will yield a profit. You might not
even get a single click-through. Why? The average click-... Continue reading ...
It’s a scandal! Going to the garden centre to buy peanuts for the bird table I was shocked to discover 97 brands of bird nuts. Vitaminized! Fortified! Guaranteed no-grow! All at miraculous prices.
Branded bird food costs more than a dinner at the Ritz.
Escaping with an ounce of Economy Peanuts I pondered the impact of branding on the modern novel. As one does.
Branding? Forget writing that debut mainstream novel, a delicate exploration of marital distress in a small Wisconsin town. Publisher... Continue reading ...
It's that perilous time of year again when New Year parties disrupt a writer's schedule. Remember when a 'person from Porlock' knocked untimely on Coleridge's door in 1797? His invitation to Coleridge "Cheer up, you silly man, and celebrate the New Year!" wrecked the poet's attempt to finish Kubla Khan.
All that remains is a forlorn fragment 54 lines long.
Don't let it happen to you! Here are 53 tested things to say when folk command you to New Year festivities, publishers' cocktail parties, a... Continue reading ...
Here’s a delightful resource that helps us to create a best-selling book title. At the Lola Titlescorer site, we can input our title and then see, in percentage terms, how it might fare in the bookshops.
As we’d expect, ‘Gone with the Wind' rates an impressive 79.6%. But then so does the nonsense title ‘@x!y£?’. Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ is not far behind at 69%, along with ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘The Lord of the Flies’. But ‘The Secret Life of the Slimeworm... Continue reading ...
News this week that best-selling author Wilbur Smith has signed a £15 million ($23 million) six-book agreement with HarperCollins - to provide novels he has no intention of writing - will bring cheer to the world’s struggling writers. At last, they can approach publishers with books they won’t write either.
Smith, who has sold 120 million swashbucklers, will simply deliver ‘novel treatments’ for other authors to complete. So the books will scream ‘Wilbur Smith’ in 70 point Arial B... Continue reading ...
Here’s a wonderful profit plan for authors that I discovered just this week (8 Oct 2012) in the London Times newspaper, a very fiction-friendly place. It seems that millionaires (bah) have been investing their surplus money in diving companies that search for treasure in old shipwrecks.
If any treasure is found, the millionaires get their money back plus a dividend. If not, they gain tax relief in excess of their investment. Believe it or not, this is a true story and many rich people have g... Continue reading ...
Have you ever written anything really bad? I mean, so bad that when chancing upon it several aeons later in your sock drawer you’ve balled it into a tight fungous ball and tossed it into the next county?
I know I have. (And I'm still doing it...)
Take heart. Famous authors have done far worse. Here are eight gems that occur in just the first five pages of Patricia Cornwell’s novel Point Of Origin (1998):
‘My heart was tripping over fear and hate and remembered horror.’
‘I told him what ... Continue reading ...
Has Fifty Shades of Grey plumbed the ultimate depths of carnal tedium? Must every public library now be infested by inventive clichés of mummy porn? So it seems. Jane Eyre Laid Bare by Clandestine Classics is the latest bid to rewrite great novels for the hard of thinking. In it, Jane ‘takes off her pants’. This is outrageous. The term ‘pants’ was not recorded until 1835.
Clearly, its author - Eve Sinclair - is blind to anachronisms. Will she now persuade us that Romeo’s Juliet wore... Continue reading ...
News that Amazon is launching a new generation of Kindle that can present novels interwoven with advertisements, sound effects and apps galore has reprised the old argument: what is a novel for?
Is it a box of textual cues from which the reader creates their own story? (Like Wuthering Heights.) Or a pre-packaged meal - love it or leave it - like a Bronte movie?
The answer must be that a novel, like war, is entertainment. All’s fair in war and entertainment. And technology is forcing us to re... Continue reading ...
News that Facebook today (18th May 2012) has gained a $104 billion flotation fills me with misgivings. Why? Let me digress a little...It’s nice to be loved, even by a robot. Happy Birthday! Or so nine emails sang to me this month. Somebody at Scribophile I’d never heard of wanted to send me a token of his esteem. (Beware geeks bearing gifts.) From eight other writing sites came an effusion of bad rhymes.Even my youngest daughter sent me one. “How did you know it was my birthday?” I a... Continue reading ...
Did you know that in Britain you can be arrested for giving offence to someone? By a mere word? Of
course, the law also obtains in other countries, and it is applied
there with enthusiasm by zealots more offensive than the offender. But
if you called me a ‘deblaterating quidnunc’ in Market Square, Leighton
Buzzard, you’d be banged up faster than a bible burner in Alabama. Deblaterating? Fair comment. But quidnunc? It cuts me to the soul.Worse,
if you were a council official or my e... Continue reading ...
News that PayPal, one of the world’s biggest on-line banks, plans to stop processing payments for books it doesn’t like has shocked me. Yes, shocked! I rarely venture into controversy. No, truly! I meant no mischief by my recent suggestion here that Shakespeare’s name was a trade mark and that his birth name was Ned Turd. It brought me so much erudite hate mail (‘Yo aint fit to lic Shakspears boots, son’) that I pledged not to do it again. But when infamy stalks the land, no honest ... Continue reading ...
Grammar is a joyful thing! I hear you cry: ‘Huh?’. But ‘tis true - trust me. (I’m a doctor.)Did you spot the seven ‘grammatical errors’ in that paragraph? A copy editor might strike out the colon before the quoted speech (‘Huh?’) and the full stop after it. S/he’d howl at the archaic ‘‘tis’. That good person would exchange the hyphen for a full stop and protest that you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction: ‘But’. No doubt, s/he would also replace the first... Continue reading ...
Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
Nonsense, or so the new movie Anonymous suggests. The Earl of Oxford wrote the entire canon of the Bard, it contends, while taking time out to be both the son and lover of Queen Elizabeth I. To use a 16th century expression: ‘Flapdoodle’.That said, the Shakespeare of Stratford probably did not write Shakespeare’s plays.Why? Let me digress for a moment.... Have you noticed that books today are not written but packaged? You pick up a novel Sapphire at a ...
News today (Oct 19, 2011) that Julian Barnes has won the £50,000 Man Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending must have shocked the prize selection committee. Why? The judges, as opposed to the committee, had vowed - for the first time - to include ‘readability’ in their criteria. And Barnes is actually readable.That was a superb snub to the literati who had traditionally recommended unreadable works that would be bought on trust (‘a Booker winner’) then flung, by disappointed reader... Continue reading ...
News that Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of the troubled News of the World, has now been arrested in the phone tapping scandal raises fresh doubts - previously unsuspected - about the ethics of creative writing programs. Let me explain...
I've just had a delightful end-term lunch with my fellow tutors at the university where, to the distress of publishers, I teach creative writing. To evade campus professors and other spies, we huddled toge... Continue reading ...
Britain’s parents are still recoiling from news that London’s latest university, the New College of the Humanities (NCH), will charge £18,000 ($28,000) a year for a syllabus that embraces ‘science literacy, critical thinking, logic and applied ethics’ but does not include creative writing.Given that all the world wants to pen a blockbuster - or, more profitably, be Sarah Palin’s ghost-writer - this oversight is odd. There’s a lot of money to be made offering courses in creative w... Continue reading ...
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John Yeoman
