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 …
PEN World Voices as Change Agent
By Chad W. Post It was almost seven years ago when I met then PEN executive director Michael Roberts and translator extraordinaire Esther Allen for drinks at the Washington Square Hotel to talk about this new festival they wanted to launch in support of international literature. The Berlin International Literature Festival was going to be their model . . . …
“Connect, Don’t Network”: Author Blog Award Winners Gaiman, Benet on Blogging
By Edward Nawotka “Use your blog to connect. Use it as you. Don’t ‘network’ or ‘promote.’ Just talk,” says author Neil Gaiman, winner of the Twitter category at the inaugural Author Blog Awards given last month in London. Gaiman is among the most popular authors on Twitter, with 1,467,539 followers as of yesterday, May 3. It should also come as …
Have Online Ads Led You to New Authors?
By Edward Nawotka Today’s lead story looks at a quiet advertising program offered by Goodreads.com which claims to have achieved good results. Have you ever tried a new author because of an online ad? If so, what was it that made you click on it? And do you find non-book related ads distracting or otherwise inappropriate on literary Web sites? …