Kiana Davenport

I just read what happened to this woman.  Go there and read for yourself how nutso legacy publishing has become.

Davenport Dialogs

The basics are she signed with Riverhead (she doesn't say that but someone scoped it out) and got $20,000 advance for her new novel.  When the publisher (where is the freaking agent thru all this, huh????) found out she had self-published 2 collections of short stories they had already rejected and had nothing to do with her novel, they brought out the lawyers and demanded the advance back.  After screaming abuse at her on the phone.

I wonder if it's the same editor at Riverhead who told me no one wanted to read romantic comedy novels about 15 years ago.  Wouldn't that be a coincidence.

More evidence of the genius at work in tradpub.  I don't know what else to say.  People who are losing their prestige and power go cuckoo.  This isn't a political blog so I won't show you the many instances from this month alone of that happening in other arenas.  Again we see the elites believing they can treat people they perceive to be beneath them with contempt and legal maneuvers.

Fire that agent.  The agent is...this is the f'ing real world, we're not talking about the agent fairy and the fielding the deals nonsense.  The agent is there to protect the writers' interests.  How is it in Kiana's interests that she's being legally harassed and verbally abused by a multinational corporation?  The agent should have been screaming right back at the editor. The editor, in the first place, has no business speaking directly to the writer in anything pertaining to the contract and fees.

Someone drive a stake through its heart before it gets up and bothers us again.  Like I keep saying "Just die already."

Amazon's New Tab

Didn't I say this just a couple days ago?  Amazon would come out with a tab the minute I rooted the Nook Color.  Scroll down in the article to learn what little we know about the autumnal release.

Amazon Tablet

What gambit of interest, what technological improvement  has traditional publishing made in the last year/5 years/10 years/25 years?

Ooo!  Me!  Me!  Me! Call on ME!

I can remember when it was a big deal, I suppose I should write that as Big Deal (trademark pending), when publishing decided to make the covers of romance novels more like greeting cards with the embossing and glitter.

I'm stumped beyond that.  No, no, wait.  I got a really excellent cook book by Richard Bertinet and it comes with a short DVD so you can see his technique.  Boy, that was very helpful.  And he's a nice man, I wrote to him and he wrote back.  DOUGH

You should be able to do that with an ebook, right?  Include a little tutorial session.

But I don't want to go off on yet another rant about legacy publishing and how they've been stiffing writers and the public for well over a generation now.

Let's talk about entertainment for a brief moment.  Certainly the Great Depression occurred well before I was born and I actually know very little about it from a financial perspective because me and math are not BFF, but I do know about it from an entertainment POV.  That's a decade I am quite familiar with film-wise much more than the 1940's or even 1950's.

It cost 10 cents to go to the movies in the 1930s.  Maybe even less in a small town 2nd run kind of situation.  Even though times were terrible, people still need to get their minds off their problems and could afford 10 cents.
As I have said Shirley Temple was one of the biggest stars of the decade and musicals were so popular.  Think of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

This is the song "Pick Yourself Up" by the great genius Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields.



What in entertainment today is suggesting we look on the bright side, pick ourselves up, rally, anything positive?
What's uplifting?  Well, gee, I can't think of anything from NYC or LA.  And the disposable income people have is dwindling, not increasing.  It's not going to be increasing any time soon.  So the old models of what people wanted to read or see or listen to is probably going to change even more.

Yet legacy publishing can't see it.  Well, good for them.  Stick to what you know.  Double that for network television.  And let's cancel the good old shows and program in some cheap to produce crap reality shows.  Hey guess what, there's this thing called the internet and the viewing audience doesn't need you anymore.

I wish there was a Charlie Chan marathon on this weekend...

Still Standing

Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind

--Bernie Taupin, of course

 

Borders didn't find a white knight to buy them out.  Now why would that be.  Surely Borders could be turned around by a savvy business team.  But the reality is, even if the business guys aren't thinking it,  there's nothing to turn it to.  It's a failing industry.  Say Borders did get bought, okay maybe not this year or next, but at some point who is going to be there to produce all the books needed to stock these stores?  The writers the publishers have treated well can fill the tables at Costco.  The rest of us have or are migrating to digital.

For those of you who haven't made the transition yet, I don't know what's holding you back.  Legacy publishing is not trying to do you any favors by publishing you.  It's not a mark of distinction to be published by them anymore.  It's more downside than up.  Get off the Titantic before it sinks.

I'm researching for my new novel.  Yes, it's started!  No, it's not in the Bad Apple series.  Even though it's a topic I'm more than passingly familiar with, I am reading up about it.  I got 2 used books from Amazon Marketplace for some background.  I don't know that there's anything there I'll use but it's understanding, it's about having a different perspective.  Then there was a book I wanted.  In hardcover it was $125.  No, I'm not paying that.  Paperback is $28.  Kindle is $17.  Wait, I have a Nook (that I haven't rooted yet).  BN doesn't have this book.  Kobo does.  It's $28.

This is part of what's killing legacy publishing.  Are you serious, people?   $125 for the hardcover and $30 for the digital?  I'll do without it, thanks.

Then you download the sample and it's 10 pages of crap acknowledgments, front matter, table of contents, dedications, "This page left blank on purpose" and if you're lucky you get a page from the actual book.

In a digital world, you have to put that stuff at the end.  I do now.  I don't even put the cover image up front anymore.  I was sorry to see it go, but while nice and attractive, it didn't help in the sample.

Here's the cover I was going to use for Unspeakably Desirable (I had a border on later versions).

I liked the...you could say strength but I was always going for violence of the fork stabbing the petit four.  People who looked at it, didn't get it.  If the banana tart cover starts to bore me with its rotundity, I'll switch back to this.  I did place a similar image to this one with a stock photo agency so apparently some people do feel its marketable.

I think about covers a lot.  We don't have the resources of legacy publishing (altho I can't imagine how Avalon could have used fewer resources on the cover for my book with them this year--I feel cheated, they couldn't even give me a good strong cover, I would have done the cover and given it to them for free just to have something marketable).  Some people can pay for a professional cover which might cost $500-$1000 or more.

The rest of us have to work around and make it happen.  Covers aren't going to look like the ones from tradpub.

I don't have an art department here helping me out but I can do something else.

I get the feeling, maybe wrongly but it's based on what I've heard, that readers are on one hand really thrilled with the 99 cent price and really angry at the same time.  They expect everything traditional publishing offers but at 99 cents.  Unrealistic.   Even traditionally published ebooks have formatting issues.  As for all the other things writers are accused of...it's wearing thin, people.