Friday, November 28, 2014

GUEST POST: Who are the gatekeepers? A musing by ELLIE SEARL, Publishista®



They guard the entrance to creativity, allowing the select few—those who pass muster—to enter. Not the riff raff, the wanabees, those sad, misguided dilettantes who try to worm their way through the slats because they think their work shows merit.
They’re the gatekeepers, and they prevent the unskilled culture-defacers from assailing the public with crap.
If it weren’t for that cadre of connoisseurs assessing, ranking, and restocking the Aesthetic Empire, the eating, viewing, and reading public wouldn’t know what to eat, view, or read.
Take food. Without the Big Food Houses, like Poach Board and Pot Watch, anyone and his second cousin could open a restaurant. BFHs put aspiring restaurateurs through a series of trial kitchens where chefs prepare innovative fare for taste testing, after which the Palate Committee flavor-edits the dishes, taking, say, six to ten months, eventually returning the recipes with recommended modifications that the would-be culinarian must integrate into menu options before contracts are finalized.
The Big Food House then spends the next year and a half designing and building the restaurant, and, once ready for business, collects all restaurant proceeds, forwarding to the owner maybe eight percent of the profits in quarterly installments.
Gastronomic gatekeepers save the world from being saturated with substandard eateries, i.e., self-established restaurants whose owners believe their food actually tastes good.
Then there’s art. Painters, sculptors, photographers. Those quirky right-brainers who think that producing art is a way of life. Without Art Gatekeepers there’d be oils and watercolors and photographs and sculptures on display all over the place—museums, galleries, stores, street corners, gardens, offices.
The Big Art Houses, such as Design Depository and Statue Statutorium, keep the art world under control. They stash submissions for review in massive warehouses, where they remain until the Talent Assessment Guild determines their attributes. The evaluation process is simple. The Appraisal Committee, made up of the administrative assistant and night janitor, stands in front of each work of art, and throws Rock, Paper, Scissors. A coin toss determines who represents the artist.
Rock over Scissors means the piece is rejected, or if small enough, displayed over the urinal in the men’s room.
Paper-over-Rock means the art is returned to the artist for revision—with a note:

“Jackson – Uh, we think you sent us your floor tarp by mistake.”
Or
“Ansel, a bit of color would be nice.” 
Or
 “Say Vincent - Don’t give up. With some practice, you’ll master perspective.”
Or
“Yo! Leonardo! My Man! – Everyone on the same side of a table? Hello.”

Now these artists, if they want a second chance with TAG, must edit their pieces according to where the dart lands on the revision wheel—Color Within the Lines, Smooth Out the Dots, Quit with the Umbrellas, Straighten the Watch, Add Velvet—anything to show they’ve at least parked at an art school.
Scissors-over-Paper means the piece is a keeper, and contracts are signed. Once a piece of art is chosen for public view, it’s put aside until there are upwards of twenty additional Scissors-over-Paper wins by the same artist—enough for a full gallery open. Could take two to five years, during which time the artist waits tables for a Pot Watch Restaurant.
Art Gatekeepers save the world from being saturated with substandard museums, galleries, and studios, i.e., self-installed exhibitions whose artists believe their art actually looks good.
Then there are writers. Good writers. Bad writers. Mediocre writers. Doesn’t matter. They all want to be published. Somewhere. But especially by the Big Book Houses, like Reticent Review and Predictable Press. Ask any writer, and he or she will say that publication is a primary goal. It’s imperative to have reading gatekeepers. Otherwise, just anybody could write and publish a book. And if just anybody could write and publish a book, there’d be books everywhere. We all know that the reading public lacks wordsmith sophistication. They read books indiscriminately, ignoring taste, creativity, style, and quotation marks on the wrong side of the period.
It’s essential that gatekeepers guard the reading public from piles of word hash plopped beside gourmet prose at any reader’s table. How dare a writer expect to publish a book without it first being prepared, plated, and presented to judges who can attest to the quality and doneness of a piece of writing?
The BBHs judge a book by its cover. Therefore, it helps if an aspiring writer has a close working relationship with a Scissors over Paper art winner. Once the cover passes muster, the interior text is evaluated—there must be a plethora of words with more than six syllables, properly embedded fonts, and an appropriate dedication to one’s mother.
The publishing world has evolved to the extent that anyone—Grandma Jones, Aunt Agnes, Cousin Earl—can publish a book. But self-publishers have no gatekeepers. Self-published books aren’t legitimate. They’re written by amateurs. Ask the gatekeepers. Self-published authors use bad grammar, change tenses, and incorporate too many adjectives and adverbs. Self-published books are puerile, shallow, and undeveloped. They’re not properly edited, they’re boring, they’re tedious— a scourge on the market.
It doesn’t matter that someone’s father, a gentleman in his early 90s, wants to publish a series of stories and see them in print before he dies. Or that a Mid-west bride wants to write her story of how she met a retired NYC police officer while playing on-line Scrabble, fell in love, and got married. Or that a mystery writer—an esteemed mystery writer—an award-winning mystery writer—chooses to go indie instead of kowtowing to the King of Kopy. It doesn’t matter that some, perhaps many, writers have dreams of seeing their words, their stories, their manuscripts, stand on a shelf between Shakespeare and Steinbeck. It doesn’t matter that, like restaurateurs and artists, they want to see their hard work come to fruition and become a product they can sell to the public, or share with their friends, or give to their children, or hold in their hands.
What’s that you say? Not all self-published books are full of crap? There are well-written, self-published books by excellent authors? That it's not the self-publishing in and of itself that qualifies a book for the back porch, not good enough for the grown-up table, not worthy of the good china?
And that just as establishing one’s own restaurant doesn't mean bad food or installing one’s own gallery doesn't mean bad art, self-publishing one's own book doesn't mean a bad read? How radical. 
     If that's the case, then here's to all writers who dream of seeing their books on the shelf or on the coffee table or shining through the small screen of an e-reader. Go for it. Don’t be intimidated by the elitism of gatekeepers.

http://www.publishista.com/Ellie_Searl.html

Friday, November 14, 2014

Leslie Budewitz: I'm a big fan!


I’ve been quoted in ONE book written by someone else and that’s Leslie Budewitz, who’s a lawyer and a mystery writer who lives in the beautiful state of Montana. Keep reading if you want to know about her prize-winning non-fiction book, which is one I keep at arms’ length when I’m writing. If you write anything to do with the law you need the book. If you love cozy mysteries, you’ll read her fiction books also. The characters she develops are textbook examples any writer could learn from. Subscribe to her blog AND her newsletter. They are never boring and always educational! And here’s her biography:



Leslie Budewitz writes mysteries and practices law in Montana. She started writing at four, on her father’s desk. Following that, he introduced her to the concept of paper, and she’s been scribbling happily ever since. Her nationally-bestselling Food Lovers' Village Mysteries (Berkley Prime Crime/Penguin Books), set in Jewel Bay, Montana, feature Erin Murphy, proprietor of The Merc, a market specializing in regional foods, in her family's century-old former grocery. Death al Dente won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel, followed by Crime Rib in July 2014. Her Seattle Spice Shop Mysteries will debut in March 2015 with Assault and Pepper. Leslie won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction for Books, Crooks and Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure (Linden/Quill Driver Books), making her the only author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. Leslie is vice president of Sisters in Crime. Visit her at www.LeslieBudewitz.com, on Facebook as LeslieBudewitzAuthor, or on Twitter, @LeslieBudewitz.  





Thursday, November 6, 2014

Who's my favorite author?



Today, I present my very favorite author in the whole wide world, my wife:




The Great Divide in ebook pricing


I always enjoy getting Amazon’s email blast featuring ebooks by my favorite authors. I’m especially humbled when I see ours included on the list.

However, I received a blast one morning last week that caused me to nearly spit out and waste a valuable cup of coffee. A new release by an author I know was priced at $12.99. This author, while popular, is not even close to being a NYT bestseller. I was so stunned that I looked up his other ebooks. While this one was priced at $12.99 he had others in a series published by a different publisher that came in at $10.67. His own self-published books were $2.99.

Is he overpriced at $12.99 or underpriced at $2.99? Is he more talented in the books priced at $12.99 that he is at those he priced at $2.99? Does he not value himself as much as his publisher values him? Or is his publisher grabbing at the hope of making big bucks on his back? What’s the take on this pricing?

This makes me wonder what we are worth versus what publishers want to make on us.

I randomly searched for pricing on more authors—authors who range from totally self-published to hybrid, to authors who are most definitely not strangers to a best seller list.

Except for special deals, like 99 cents or free, I found the range on one popular author alone, to be from $2.99 to $8.39—this from a hybrid author who’s had books on the NYT best seller list. She is trad published for some, and self-pubbed for others. She has books priced at $2.99, $3.99, $4.99, $5.99, $6.99, $7.54. and $8.39.

Across the board, I noticed that authors published either by a Big House, or medium indie, were typically above $4.99, more like $7.69 to $10.99. A few like the one that made me choke on my morning beverage were way up there.

Several best- selling authors, like Patricia Cornwell, were $7.99 to $8.99. Most of Jeffrey Deavers’s were $5.99 to $8.99 except for his brand new one which is $14.99.

James Lee Burke’s were anywhere from $5.99 to $12.74.

So what’s going on with ebook pricing? Why the disparity in pricing? Most of all these books used for price comparisons were of the same length.

It makes me think about the Amazon vs Hachette battle that has been raging. Who’s making the money on the high priced books? Methinks it’s not the author.

If you are an author, what do YOU think your ebooks should sell for?

In the next installment, I’ll ask readers to weigh in on what they feel is fair market pricing, and do they buy books at full retail, or do they prefer to buy when they are being promoted, or buy the print books, etc. More on that in another post.

CLICK HERE FOR SHARON'S WEBSITE

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Little bits about a couple of things!



A LITTLE ABOUT THIS BLOG


Let’s talk about the law. Specifically, the criminal law. In the United States of America, we have at least fifty different sets of criminal statutes. Add to that all the territories (Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.) and the federal statutes, we have more sets.


Needless to say, that gets confusing quickly.


What I intend to do here in this blog is to discuss legal issues that are important to writers but also to entertain and inform you, the readers of our books. Without readers, after all, we’d be writing to each other. Right now, I’m aiming for a weekly blog. If you sign up, you’ll get the new blog emailed to you. Note that all I ask is your email address. You don’t have to fill out the rest if you don’t want to. And I never ever will use your email address for anything else but to send you this blog.




A LITTLE ABOUT MY BOOKS


My murder mystery book series begins with COURTING MURDER where the main character (Judge Rosswell Carew) is introduced and the theme of the series is introduced. That is human trafficking or, more correctly called slavery.


As you may already know, my books have a lot of humor. How can a writer discuss something as horrible as slavery with humor? Good question. And I answer it by writing that way in my books. There’s a message there but the message is wrapped in humor.


The second book in the series is RIVER MOURN where Rosswell fights a battle that’s exceptionally personal. The third book is BLOODY EARTH* which deals with the death of a public official.

But all my books have (and will have) the theme of fighting slavery. And if you don’t think the concept of laughter and tears are two sides of the same face, look at the comedy/tragedy mask that is ancient.