DIY Bookbinding

For all the book lovers among us (isn't that all of us?) who have ever desired to make their own books--literally--or wondered about how books are crafted, see this wiki: DIY Bookbinding - Home of an expanded version of an art... This is a reference just for fun. You know my negative position on using information in wikis as reliable resources for publication. However, the author of this website has some great creds:

Brian Sawyer is lead editor for O'Reilly Media's Hacks series. When he's not under the hood of a paid project or working pro bono for his wife, he can often be found fiddling with books in other some capacity, either hand binding, experimenting with layout, reviewing for his personal blog, or just plain reading to his son.

[books]

Blame the Bard

Who invented these common phrases: "foul play," "as luck would have it," "your own flesh and blood," "too much of a good thing," "good riddance," "in one fell swoop," "cruel to be kind," "play fast and loose," "vanish into thin air," "the game is up," "truth will out" and "in the twinkling of an eye"?

According to the Writer's Almanac, Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including those listed above. Are they cliches? Blame the bard. [English language]

Writers' Ethics

Did you ever wonder what a "book packager" does? In the latest plagiarism brouhaha over Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta etc., now pulled from shelves, the NY Times provides some interesting insights in First, Plot and Character. Then, Find an Author.

But on the copyright page--and the contracts--there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment. ... In many cases, editors at Alloy--known as a "book packager"--craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers). ... Alloy owns or shares the copyright with the authors and then divides the advances and any royalties with them.

And did I hear correctly, that the advance was half a mil? According to the author in a Today Show interview earlier this week, she received this offer when she was 19 for a book she'd started writing when she was 17, which must have been right after her last of several readings of the two books from which she is accused of lifting copy. Sounds like K-12 education needs to add ethics training to the curriculum.

If you'd like to test your judgmentment in a variety of situations, take the quiz in next month's Writer's Digest's Are You an Ethical Writer? Come up lacking or questioning? Poynter Online has an entire division of its website devoted to ethics and two free online courses in its News University. [writing]

Blogosphere State

Notes from Sifry's Alerts: On Blogosphere Growth:

Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

This was only the tip of the iceberg. The article is filled with informative graphs and charts. Stay tuned for excerpts from the even more fascinating Part II. [blogging]

Google's Latest

Some of the latest hyperactivity from the Google brains include: acquiring Writely a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. More info. Then there's the Google Calendar, which I'm still trying to understand if I can use it within a writer's website to alert readers of upcoming author events. Finally, Google gets into book sales:

Google intends to begin selling the full text of books indexed via its Google Book Search in the near future. In a new entry on the Google Book Search Help Center, the search giant outlines how publishers will be able to sell online access to the contents of their books.

Publishers' information at Google.

With online access, users who discover a book through Google Book Search will be able to pay for immediate access to its full contents. You decide if a book should be available, and you set the online access price. The book will be available to users only through their browser, and only when they've signed in with their personal account. Users cannot save a copy on their computer or copy pages from the book.

Self-Publishing Books

Earlier this year JA Konrath wrote A Newbie's Guide to Publishing: Thinking POD? Think Again..... And the comments just keep on hitting this post. The consensus seems to be that self/vanity/subsidy/POD publishing can work well for nonfiction, sample copies, and for the person who doesn't care about fame and/or fortune but just wants to hold a book in hand or to give as gifts. Frustrated novelists, don't even bother glancing at self-publishing if you want to Be a Successful Writer and/or make money. Send your first chapter (up to 3,000 words) to The Writing Show's contest for a chance to win a cash prize and other promotional goodies. That might get your work noticed by someone who knows someone who ... [books]

Encarta Quizzes

MSN Encarta - Quiz has a large language and literature section. I found it through the website EntSpire, home for the word and phrase game, Derivation. It sounds like this game would help ESL's polish their use and understanding of English idioms, those indefinable phrases and usages that native speakers all know and learners puzzle over, like "a pig in a poke". [language]

RSS Research

For a writer who specializes in particular topics, subscribing to syndicated information feeds (RSS) on those topics can be a time saver and a great convenience. Instead of making the rounds of pertinent websites and databases, even through a search engine, you can let the Internet deliver the latest info through your door and onto your monitor. Rich Ziade at Basement.org offers numerous suggestions in Taking RSS Beyond Headlines : Part One and Part Two. Now, if I could only concoct an easy way to incorporate an RSS feed into a web page! Why? Because Yahoo! has a super Books and Literature service I want to use, much like the one from the NY Times that ends this page. [research]

Publish & Peddle

"Publish and Peddle . . .or Perish: A Sales Guide to Selling your Book. A few years ago Your Business Blogger advised a number of academic authors on the marketing of books."

Jack Yoest suggests:

1. Feature your book on your web site and blog.
2. Issue a press release.
3. Include on your syllabus.
4. Write your own copy.
5. Submit your work to your network.
6. To sell 800 books, write 800 words.
7. Rap with the Reps.
8. Schedule a book signing.
9. Memorize your 8 second sound cites.
10. Book hook for bookers and lookers

Then Yoest expands with details on how to go about performing each of the ten items. Most of them are applicable to any author, not just college professors. [book marketing]

Pulitzer Prizes

This week The Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The winners for "Letters" were:

Fiction -- March by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
History -- Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky (Oxford University Press)
Biography -- American Prometheus: by Kai Bird and Martin
Poetry -- Late Wife by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)
General Non-Fiction -- Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt)

Although I could find no prohibition against self-published entries, all winners come from traditional presses. [contests]

Fair & Balanced

Nicholas Lemann's article On Balance in the Columbia Journalism Review commented on David Horowitz's calls for J-schools to hire more conservative faculty. Is this the same David Horowitz, fellow Wildcat from Northwestern, who graduated a few years before I did?

David Horowitz, the left-wing activist turned right-wing activist, recently produced a study of the ideological leanings of faculty members at leading law and journalism schools. He found that they are overwhelmingly liberal ...

Lemann explains the foundations of academic journalism and then concludes:

Our mission should be to rid our students of automatic or blinkered thinking; to teach them to recognize and try to overcome the assumptions and preconceptions they bring to a story, to make them push themselves to find alternative perspectives. Sometimes this entails explicitly considering ideological positions. It doesn't always, though. For us to build in liberal-conservative balance in every hire and every class would be to take us away from our core assumption, which is that reporting can get you meaningfully closer to the truth. Not a version of truth — the truth.

Right! That's the way I learned to report and feature, long before creative nonfiction and gonzo journalism appeared. [journalism]

30 Million Blogs

In the Washington Post website, Frank Ahrens' Web Watch on 30 Million Blogs And Counting . . .

Writing in Slate, Daniel Gross wonders if the blogosphere may be teetering on its own 1999 -- the year before the tech bubble burst. A recent Gallup poll titled "Blog Readership Bogged Down" showed that only 9 percent of those polled said they regularly read blogs, while 66 percent said they never read them.

There is no paucity of blogs. Technorati, the search engine that tracks the blogosphere, counts 28.7 million blogs on the Web. But there are indicators the numbers are peaking: The Gallup poll said "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative" during 2005.

He posited some possible reasons, then asked readers to send in their reasons for blogging. Apparently he received an eyeful. He said:

In a bit of meta-blogging, some responded to my question in their blogs and referred me to them. Other kids were too cool for school and would not deign to answer such a ridiculous question that was so far behind the times. Instead, they flamed me on their blogs. Whatev. [blogging]

Writing Contest

No, this one isn't mine, but I have agreed to be a judge in The Writing Show's first fiction contest. It's for the first chapter of a novel, up to 3,000 words. Prizes include cash and exposure online, and get this -- NO ENTRY FEE! The contest will be conducted all electronically, so you don't even have to spring for printing or postage. [contests]

Virtual Journalist

The Virtual Journalist is a funny, but looong animated cartoon about the life of a newspaper reporter. Viewing the anime requires Flash and perhaps a broadband connection. It is interactive, too. The results of each episode depend on which box choice you click. However, when I checked to see if it still worked, just before posting this, I found an "Easter egg". I accidentally clicked outside the "BEGIN" box on the first frame and was treated to a music video about the news.

[journalism]

Using Releases

Over at the Copyblogger, Brian Clark offers tips on How to Use the Modern Press Release. His first discovery was one I made decades ago: the best-written releases end up verbatim in print. And why not? If the copy is better than the reporter can write, they'll use it as is.

In other words, thanks to online PR services, your press release automatically becomes web content, which means it has a shot at automatically becoming news.

He explains how to get your releases out to journalists, listed in top online news sources, distributed by RSS, and more, and even for free. Every time you do something newsworthy -- appear at an event or on a show; give a talk; get a poem, story, or article published (let alone a book or do a book signing); receive an award; begin a new venture -- take advantage of the opportunity to release the information to the public in a way that will boost your writing career. [promotions]

Poetry Videos

It's not news that Google offers videos, but did you know about the Authors@Google program?

From the Googleplex: Authors@Google is a speaker series where thought-provoking, Zeitgeist-making, trend-setting authors come to the Googleplex to read from their works and share their thoughts with us.

See all the videos of authors.

I thought of this today for poets like me, too shy to even attend a "slam". But I haven't had a book of poetry published, so I might look into the amateur version offered by You Tube. It's the rage among the tech-savvy younger set. A quick search there on "poetry" revealed 705 videos already!

[Google poetry video readings]

Buy the Book

In Buy the Book, Zachary Rodgers writes:

Jeff Yamaguchi, patron of the popular "project-making" Weblog 52projects.com, recently parlayed the success of his site into a spin-off book: "52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity."

The volume was published in November. In the intervening three months, it sold several thousand copies and drove new traffic to his site. That, in turn, has fueled audience growth and given birth to an online community that shares his interest in the creative life of the mind.

"If it hadn't been for my site and reaching out to the creative community online, my book would not have sold at all," Yamaguchi said.

He's also the online marketing manager for HarperCollins and shares his thoughts on the changes the web has made in how books are currently thought about and sold. He describes:

* Empowering Authors
* New Word of Mouth
* Book Form Changes

[creativity e-books book marketing]

Morbid Depression

After reading Wild Women, I commented to a creativity group, "So many of these women were considered crazy, lesbians, alcoholic, depressed; or they committed suicide."

"Or all at the same time," one wag quipped.

"Men writers, too," I pointed out. "But why, I wonder. Do we have to be any or all of the above to be creative?"

Of course there are exceptions, plenty of them. And being lesbian does not quite fit, but it is being different from the norm. It just looks like more of the women I read about had those characteristics than would happen by chance. The ones who didn't exhibit unusual behaviors were "free spirits", doing what they wanted. Courageous is another way to view them. Even ruling out affectations, it still seems that creative people are more prone to self-destructive bents. The American Experience film on Eugene O'Neill intensified my interest. That creative was dangerous to others, yet as he lay dying, he pumped out his greatest works.

I have been more than half in love with death. [creativity]

Moot Point

Twice in the last month I've heard (on TV) different people refer to an issue as being "a mute point". I know what they meant was "a moot point". In a footnote you'll find this explanation for the term, Thus, a moot point, however debatable, is one that has no practical value. This is how we ordinarily use it, legalese notwithstanding. To substitute the word "mute" for "moot" seems indefensible, especially in speech. "Moo" does not resemble "mew" closely enough to my ear to confuse the words. They are not spelled the same nor pronounced the same. For a word person, hearing these errors is so distracting that it is difficult to follow an argument or take the speaker seriously. Bump up your credibility by choosing your words carefully and make sure you say what you mean and mean what you say, 100%, as the old cartoon character used to spout. Who said that? Popeye? Sylvester the Cat? [words]

43

Just tootling around the Internet, I drop in on ramdom blogs by writers. One day I found 43. This is Geoff's description of his blog and how and why he uses it:

The number 43 bus runs from Manchester Piccadilly to Manchester Airport, and back again. There is nothing particularly exciting about this bus, except that it's the bus that I get to town (and back again). I suppose it would be fantastic to travel around the world to amazing places and write about it, like a travel writer, but I can't do that. What I can do is get the 43 bus to town (and back again), and, you know, waste not want not and all that. Moreover, I think getting the 43 bus can be pretty good.

[blogging]

Fruit-Baskets to Google

Such a brouhaha people are raising over Google's book scanning project. (What's it's name this month -- Print? Library? Search?) You can catch up on the fuss with the Culture Vulture at the Guardian Unlimited. Warning: "bad" words in some of the comments. I think author Cory Doctorow make a good case for a positive attitude over at Boing Boing: Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google. Warning: very long post!

Wherever you come down on this issue, copyright infringement to godsend for out of print books in the long tail, or confused in-between, consider that Google may expand this service to non-book items. In the future all writing will be electronic. Your article/short story/ad copy/report/dissertation will reside only in digital format on servers that eventually wear out. The more warehouses of duplicates of our writing, the better, I say. [Google Book Search copyrights the long tail]

Jubilate Agno

Today, the Writer's Almanac reminds us, is the birthday of

the poet Christopher Smart, ... born in Shipbourne, Kent, England (1722). He's the author of the epic poem Jubilate Agno, written around 1763, which went on for hundreds of pages, in which Smart attempted to praise God for every single aspect of his life, including his cat Jeoffry.

I love Smart's poem about his cat, and find Smart's life fascinating. You can read a portion of the poem at Christopher Smart, "on his cat Jeoffrey," from Jubilate Agno:

Christopher Smart, who was tossed in the madhouse for his incessant praying (in the street, for the most part), constantly asks what creativity is, what rationality and irrationality are. His poems let loose a portion of the imagination which the age of reason makes a point of keeping fettered with social norms and conventional religion; in this way his raptures are related to the scenes of redemptive or escapest madness we see in the literature of Sensibility ...

[poetry cats creativity]

Drop Everything And Read

Drop Everything And Read on April 12.

PitchFest

PitchFest:

Ever hear of speed dating? The PitchFest is a similar concept, except the "dates" are with film and television executives. Basically, you enter a large room with up to 100 decision makers spread throughout. A bell rings, and you sit down to have a five minute pitch session with the decision maker of your choice. At the end of that time, a bell rings again and your meeting ends. A new group enters the room and someone takes your place, and the process is repeated. You leave the pitching room, and join a line to either meet with someone else, or attend a pitching workshop where you can hone your pitch and learn the 'ins and outs' of delivering a pitch in five minutes or less.

[PitchFest screenwriting]

Self-Publishing Steps

In a Writing Show post (read) and podcast (listen), Matthew Wayne Selznick, author of the novel Brave Men Run, names names and quotes figures. The Self-Publishing Step by Step reveals:

Why he self-published
How much it has cost to publish his novel
What he gets from his self-publishing company
Which free software he used
How he created his own cover using free art
How much money he gets from each sale
How he's marketing and selling his book

[books podio self-publishing]

Readability Test

Usually when people ask me, "how did you find that [photo, link, service]" I'm at a loss. This time I can tell you that I found the link to Juicy Studio: Readability Test on the Kinja home page for this blog. Over on the right side is a box with several services. The little orange JS button labeled "analyze readability" caught my eye. So, here's the report for this blog's index page on March 27:

I'm not certain whether to laugh, cry, or just be satisfied. [writing]

Releton Search

An exciting new search facility, Releton Search, allows you to weight a search more toward Google or Yahoo results. The really nifty feature I like is the Google vs. Yahoo rank scores under each result. This is not PageRank, but the place order for each website in returns for a search like the one illustrated, for "freelance writing". It provides a hint of how the two major engines vary in ranking algorithms. [research]

Spelling Tests

Spelling-Tests.com has lists of commonly misspelled words. You can see a list of words Canadians misspell most frequently (looked the same as the U.S. one to me) and generate spelling tests with various possibilities that none of the words are wrong (US or Canadian versions, too). Perhaps our northern neighbors are more prone to using British spelling? And I thought they just talked funny. Pleasing to the ear, but is sounds funny to this American. I could listen to Dominic Da Vinci all day. That's the character in "Da Vinci's Inquest" on TV. [resources]

McAfee's SiteAdvisor

Sometimes I diddle around a while before creating a post on a topic. I was waiting to diddle with Protection from Spyware, Spam, Viruses and Online Scams SiteAdvisor before commenting and/or recommending it. However, McAfee jumped the gun with today's news of its acquisition:

As the first company to test and rate, on an ongoing basis, nearly every site on the Internet, SiteAdvisor is the ultimate consumer bodyguard, clearly identifying potentially dangerous web sites that have engaged in 'social engineering' attacks, such as spyware, adware, spam, browser attacks, and online scams. The easy-to-use software summarizes these findings with intuitive red, yellow, and green icons that empower online users to decide what to browse and what to avoid.

Just to be really safe, I tested Writer's Edge and got the green light, er, check mark. Now I must don my crash helmet, Ove Gloves, knee pads, elbow pads, full body rad suit, and buckle my seat belt before further net surfing. [websites SiteAdvisor McAfee]

Screen Plays

A request yesterday to look over a script-in-progress reminded me that I haven't noted the exciting transition of Damian McNicholl's book, A Son Called Gabriel, into a play. In The public reading, he lets us peek into an author-playwright collaboration's peak moment. Interview with McNicholl ... Review of the book.

Then there are the B Movie Writers

One screenwriting team's journey into the bowels of B-Movie land, and their heroic quest to create something entertaining and watchable... all while juggling the rules of B-Moviedom, the foreign market, and a bi-coastal writing partnership.

I met one of the partners on the Writer's Digest forum and thought this group blog would be interesting to follow.

Another new online writerly friend is Scott Virtes, also a screenwriter and fellow San Diego resident. He doesn't just write scripts, however. This multi-talented guy cranks up his creativity machine to encompass poetry, puzzles, fiction, games, and software. We'd attended the same chat recently, and he wondered, "Were you the one who asked about collaborations?" I told him I'm all for them--just look at what the guys above are accomplishing! [screenplays plays collaboration]

First Blooker

The blog to book phenom, Julia and Julie, which I blogged about last August has won top prize in the lulu.com-sponsored Blooker Award. Cory Doctorow, one of the judges, said, "Those who dismiss blogging as "mere" confessional writing and complaining about one's day job fail to appreciate just how engrossing those genres can be when handled by a talented writer like Julie Powell. The story of how blogging--writing in public--changed Powell's life is inspirational and memorable." [blogging a book]

Getting Paid

The Writers Weekly website features a Whispers and Warnings segment where owner Angela Hoy exposes publishers reluctant to reward writers for their work. In a recent example Writer Receives $500 for Unauthorized Use of Her Work Hoy advised,"Don't let the crooks try to drag you into an emotional argument. Simply invoice them, request prompt payment for the illegal use of your work, and don't be afraid to demand what you deserve." She included a link to the offender's pretty website which contains many articles. You might want to check to see if one of yours was used without permission. Another way to check the whole WWW is to type the URL of the original page where your work appears into the service at Copyscape. I've been testing another service that uses JavaScript and Google to check chunks of text, but I don't think it's quite ready for prime time here. Stay tuned! [copyrights]

Gada Be

Disclaimer: gada.be is the brainchild of Chris Pirillo, originator of Lockergnome.com, a blog/ezine/website to which I sometimes contribute for no compensation other than a link to this blog. From About Us :: gada.be:

What is gada.be? It's a metasearch service, no matter where or how you view it. gada.be is for anybody with access to the Web and in need of immediate, impartial results:

Save time, page loads, and keystrokes
Get vendor-neutral results from fantastic resources
Output OPML for easy importing into news aggregators
Link your tags to gada.be for more comprehensive results
Load with slow connections, Treos, PSP, dial-up, cell phones
Search through an ever-expanding set of results
Navigate a simple subdirectory structure, quick to key-in
Run it on either desktop-based or mobile devices
View or subscribe to results in RSS
Get full access without needing to register

You're going to save time and bandwidth immediately; imagine how long it would take to traverse all those sites just to find the one thing you were looking for!? If you tend to view only the top results for a cursory search, why not just feed you the top results in one easy spot (where you can subsequently subscribe to them)?

[research]

Poetry Month

This year National Poetry Month begins with Buy a Friend a Book Week. You can probably guess what I propose you buy your friend (and yourself). No foolin'! Ah, if only What Wine Goes With Hot Dogs? were available. [poetry]