By Mark Garcia-Prats In hopes of extending the positive attention about Africa stemming from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, The Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artist is sponsoring a writing project called Pilgrimages. The idea for the series is that during Africa’s first World Cup, 14 African writers will be sent to 13 different African cities …
The Death of “Submit-Wait-Pray”: Self Publishing as a Cottage Industry
By Angela K. Durden ATLANTA: As late as the start of the twentieth century, cottage industries supported many families. When automation arrived, “cottage industry” became an undeserved term for substandard work. But the cottage industry has made a comeback. I know, because I am one. So are my co-authors — Marla Brown, Eleanor Morgan, and Peggy Parks. After meeting through …
Does Working in Publishing Help or Hinder Your Writing?
By Edward Nawotka Today’s lead story looks at how Vintage Books publicist Sloane Crosley balances her day job with her night time passion. It’s often said that everyone in publishing secretly wants to be a writer. But is working in publishing really a good idea for a writer? What does all the exposure to the treadmill of new books, underwhelming …
Tag Team: YA Authors Mechling, Moser on Collaboration in the Digital Age
Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser have been co-authors of teen novels for nearly a decade. Their latest collaboration My Darklyng is a young adult novel running on Slate.com (with enhanced features unfolding on Facebook, Twitter, and other dark corners of the Internet) throughout the summer. Pros as tag-team fiction-writing, Mechling and Moser are taking their first a stab at co-authored …
Literary 360: Rebecca Chace on Going from Screenplay to Novel to Screenplay
By Rebecca Chace I didn’t know anything about writing screenplays, but the novel first appeared in my head as a movie. At the time I was a working actor who had grown up in a family of New York writers and didn’t think of myself as a writer. Don’t get me wrong, I wrote constantly: backstage between scenes, in trailers …
Is Bookselling a Good or Bad Job for a Writer?
By Edward Nawotka I often people that I learned more over the four years I spent working in a bookstore than I did at university. It’s true — being around all those books and being responsible for them was genuinely enlightening. On the other hand, as an aspiring writer, there were days when I looked at all those books, particularly …
What Types of Books are Better Served by Authors Collaborating?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead article author Clay Shirky notes that intense collaboration is changing the very definition of the word author. “So a bunch of stuff that used to be done by individuals is now being done by groups, when groups can do it better,” he says. What types of books are better served by authors collaborating, than …
The Questions: Author Glenn Taylor on Second Novels and the Writing Life
By Glenn Taylor I teach at a large community college just outside Chicago. My students come from all walks of life. During the first week of every semester, I ask them to write an in-class essay on a meaningful person or event from their past. It was through these essays that I first began to realize how many of my …
Is a Writer’s Expectation of Riches Now Unrealistic?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s editorial, “We Are All Poets Now” author Nina de Gramont writes movingly about her experience of falling in-and-out of favor with a big New York publishing house and then finding contentment in moderating her expectations of financial rewards from her writing career. Writers like to dream of getting rich from their work. But as digitization …
We Are All Poets Now
Editorial by Nina de Gramont In the late nineties, when I was just a couple years out of graduate school, something happened to me that all young writers dream about: I got a two book deal from a big New York publishing house. I remember the phone call exactly, where I was standing, which windows were open, and the temperature …