Where is my Vote?

#FreeIran
Better late than never!

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Citing Electronic Sources

"Cite Your Sites" first popped into mind. Cute. Dumb SEO. Clever wordplay. All of the above. This proposed title is a nice play on rhyming words and the cliché "set your sights," but it would confuse search engines and not help people looking for information on the title used.

Paula Offutt's comment about the lame Anderson Plagiarism Apology prompted this post. Anderson's lame claim was that plagiarism in his recent book resulted from an inability to find a way to cite electronic sources. Such information is available in any style manual. Finding the citation styles online for free is another matter. Presumably Anderson can afford to own current copies of all style guides. Where was the publisher's editor in all this? What about a fact checker? It is difficult to check facts with no sources cited.

If you don't understand about citing sources at all, read the information on the Long Island University (C.W. Post Campus) Library web page on Citations. I particularly like:

Use this rule of thumb: If you knew a piece of information before you started doing research, generally you do not need to credit it. You also do not need to cite well-known facts, such as dates, which can be found in many encyclopedias. All other information such as quotations, statistics, and ideas should always be cited in your papers.

Advice on which style to use, Citation Style for Research Papers, also applies to nonacademic articles and books:

# APA: psychology, education, and other social sciences.
# MLA: literature, arts, and humanities.
# AMA: medicine, health, and biological sciences.
# Turabian: designed for college students to use with all subjects.
# Chicago: used with all subjects in the 'real world' by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications.

This all reminds me to write on Site vs. Cite vs. Sight.

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Serious Summer Reading

The vicious cycle of book reviewing brought serious summer reading this year. I'll spend the season dipping into the rich, dense Wendy Doniger compendium The Hindus: An Alternative History.

A much smaller, more painful one to read is Andrew Levy's A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary. I had suspected I'd had migraines until menopause, but reading about them seems to be bringing them back--at least while I'm vicariously experiencing Levy's rough ride. His search for a solution brings resolution of his relationship with a painful Other living within his head.

Not quite as dense as THE HINDUS, but equally fascinating, is a fictionalized view of the beginnings of Islam. Mother of the Believers: A Novel of the Birth of Islam by Kamran Pasha, tells the story through the eyes of "Aisha, the youngest and most beloved wife of the Prophet." Although the author's first novel, it is the product of a successful Pakistani-American Hollywood screenwriter, contributing to lush descriptions and intense characterizations that make this one closer to a "beach read."

But wait, there's more! I'm running out of room to mention :

The Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon
Happy Trails to You: Stories by Julie Hecht
Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain by Lorie Tharps

The first two are rather dreary fiction, and the third--what can I say? A crazy, mixed-up black girl grows up in the vanilla Midwest, never happy with her self-imposed succession of identities until she finds out that slavery flourished in Spain. Huh?

These books were published by The Penguin Press, Simon & Schuster, Putnam and Washington Square Press.

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Then vs. Than

Do you confuse then and than? They look and sound alike, but for one letter. That suggests a lack of basic vocabulary knowledge of word meanings. Try to keep in mind that then involves a sequence in time, while than involves a comparison:

Jane threw the ball farther than Dick did.
Then Dick threw Jane down the well.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, than functions as a preposition or a conjunction, indicating a difference, while then works three jobs: adverb, noun and adjective, all of them involving a temporal aspect (time), including a use meaning "besides" or "in addition".

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Writers Eat Absinthe Now

Absinthe Mints

Absinthe is a strong, herb-infused, alcoholic beverage that was extremely popular with artists and authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Due to its green color and purported hallucinogenic qualities, it is often referred to as “The Green Fairy.”

Available from the inimitable Archie McPhee website.

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Anderson Plagiarism Apology

Sounds like a lackapologica! Chris Anderson accused after lifting passages for 'free' | theBookseller.com:

'All those are my screw-ups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources'.

How pitifully lame.

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Writer Resource Roundup

If you're a freelancer in Canada or one who works for Canadian clients, you may be confused about what to charge or what pay to expect. The writers.ca • find a professional writer in canada site can help you out. It offers useful information for all freelancers, including sections on professional practices and copyrights.

Have a book for sale on Amazon.com? Are you participating in whatever they call their authors' blogs--a good marketing move. Another, more hidden, bonus is the Amazon Vine™ Program, which "enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions. Customers are invited to become Amazon Vine™ Voices based on the trust they have earned in the Amazon community for writing accurate and insightful reviews."

Who doesn't need more pictures to choose from? Shareapic - The pic sharing site that gives back! is a newer resource. I intend to join because of the front page tease (ignoring all the exclamation points):

We pay $0.22 per 1000 pic views.. that's more than some major ad networks pay their publishers!
- We allow you to add your Bidvertiser © code to your image and gallery pages.
- We pay out within 30 days!
- One click posting to Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Orkut, and more!

Now, it's back to the cat race.

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1900 Posts on Writing

1900 posts on writing in the Archives--this log in info greeted me today. Thanks to hypertext, they're mostly all searchable by good engines. A post doesn't need have the label of the search keyword, either. I try to keep up with advances in search technology suitable for use with and on a blog. That's the reason the engine of choice at the top of the posts' column on the blog page changes with annoying frequency. I am not impressed with Bing, and I haven't seen a "personal" version available.

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AWE Tweet Chats Coming?

I may miss the #editorchat on Twitter tonight. [Is that faint cheering in the background?] I'm running off to the fair. After days in deep "edit brain" mode, my body needs a little fun, junk food, seeing plants, touching animals, and time spent with a close friend.

One reason why I joined the chats for editors and attend via TweetChat.com, was to try out the activity with a thought of holding one for writers. Of course, the hundreds of you who tag along in MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, RSS Readers, via email (blog and Inspiration) will need to have Twitter accounts--but not necessarily to Follow me or to reveal your identities. I also signed up with another service that provides private chat rooms and, of course, there's always the much less secure chat services provided by MSN, Yahoo, Google and Orkut.

Anita Campbell summed up the advantages and features nicely in a post on the Online Media Network The Cool New Way to Network on Twitter:

The benefits of tweetchats are many. They bring together people with similar interests. You can crowd-source ideas. You can carry on a group discussion in context – and using the right tool – “see” the full conversation uninterrupted by unrelated tweets.

What do you think? Would you like to have A Writer's Edge Chats? What form appeals most: general gabfests, directed conversations, specific topics, a mixture? Or about which subjects would you like to have a chat with me, other writers and maybe editors, agents, publishers?

Leave suggestions in comments, or send cards and letters (email).

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Monetize Your Blogs

Who wants to make money with a blog? Hands up all around. No matter if you blog just to prime the creative pump, to keep in touch or to market another product--most everyone would like for the blog to at least pay for itself. The simplest goal might be to obtain a return on the time spent posting.

The latest scheme I've heard is Bloggapedia's syndication plan, wherein a blogger would receive 30% of 30% of a minimal amount every time someone downloads A Writer's Edge to a mobile device. Do you want to read blogs on your phone? I'm doubtful, but I could be very wrong and miss the boat with this one.

Other more tested strategies include hosting advertising on your blog site. I prefer outrightly selling ad space over installing AdSense or one of the other pay-per-click scams plans. When you sell straight ad space, you get paid up front and only need to display the advertising as agreed. Get that? YOU GET PAID. First. Period. In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash.

Nonetheless, if you're intent on taking the easy way, joining blog networks is another option. They make money by distributing advertising across networks of website properties, sharing earnings with site owners, based on the amount of traffic generated. For your blog to qualify, it needs to have a good visitor rate, display fresh specific content and you must keep up the pace of posting. Networks you can explore include:

451Press -- http://www.451press.com/

9rules --http://9rules.com/

B5Media -- http://www.b5media.com/

BeautyBlog Network -- http://www.beautyblognetwork.com/

Curbed Network -- http://curbed.com/advertise/contact.php

Glam Media -- http://www.glam.com/

SBNation -- http://www.sbnation.com/

SkinnyMoose -- http://skinnymoose.com/network/

Weblogs Inc --http://www.weblogsinc.com/

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New Novel Lengths

Do you want to be indulged or to be published? Too often the queries I receive about editing a novel include the sad information that "it will be an easy job, because it's only 72,000 words long." I feel ethically-bound to refuse the work or, at the very least, alert the writer that the manuscript needs bulking up. Even more frequently clients tell me, "I know it's a little long at 140,000 words, but I already edited it down from 210,000, and I just can't take any more out!"

That is a more hopeful situation because copyediting will reduce even a fairly well-written story by at least 10 percent. Any good editor can find subplots or scenes to cut, "tightening up" the writing. Overwriting is a common problem for writers with less experience. That's one reason why I encourage new writers to blog and why I'm excited (to a lesser degree) about the feature of Twitter that forces brevity. (Unfortunately, Twitter-talk also induces a habit of dropping articles (a, the) and other niceties of good writing.)

I looked for recent information from an authoritative source concerning novel lengths. Literary agent Michelle Brower included a point on it in the Wendy Sherman Associates blog. The post earlier this month contains query tips from her experience on a panel at the Backspace Conference:

Nearly all of the queries I looked at in the workshop were clocking in at or above 120,000 words. That is almost always too long, and makes me think you haven't edited enough. I think an appropriate length for most adult commercial fiction is between 75,000 and 100,000, and YA is between 60,00 and 80,000. Literary fiction usually is harder to pin down; it just has to be super special.

I see a creeping concision taking place in acceptable lengths for novels. I'll have to retool my mouth to stop parroting, "80 to 120 thousand words for a first novel".

"But, but ... Stephen King!" I hear some of you sputtering. Yes. And King already has an agent, a publisher and a long track record. When you're a rich and famous novelist, you, too, may write long, rambling masterpieces. For now, do you want to indulge yourself, or do you want to get published?

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Blogger's Folly

Before Blogger's Brain, comes Bloggers Folly, the most common cause of writers' deaths in the United States. (Third is Social Overload--same referenced post). Blogger's Folly occurs when bloggers, usually newbies, advise others on a subject with which they have little experience.

One of these incidents happened last week or so. A blogger, who appears never to have been otherwise published, expounded on something related to editing. Another editor commented that the blogger's points are invalid. I entered a comment supporting the other editor, and I added my views and a few suggestions for a more useful technique.

Apparently the blogger moderates comments. Mine has yet to show up. I know the system received it, because when I tried to enter it again, I received an error message that the same material had already been sent.

I asked yet a third writer/editor what she thought of the post, just in case my brain had been on hold when I wrote the comment. (It happens!) My experienced friend said:

What did you say? I think her recommendations are pretty terrible too, but one of the other commenters offered some good objections.

Here's the folly: not taking your lumps. It's O.K. to make a mistake. Being embarrassed and/or angry is natural. It's not acceptable to duck and run. That makes your writing junkjournalism--the worst kind. I would not be surprised to find the post or even the blog soon gone. The next person she does this to may not be so kind as not to out her.

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Urban Shakespeare

Shakespeare in the city!

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Writing Valuable Content

"Indispensable" was a feature of the Twitter #editorchat topic recently. I queried "like 'rich content'?" Now I find 6 Steps to Valuable Internet Content by Yann Gourvennec, originally published at BNET UK. I'd call the post indispensable reading for anyone serious about website/blog writing and about monetization of a site. Consider that

"...Marketers are now finally waking up to the idea that pre-formatted communications aren’t the right way to engage with customers...by valuable content? I mean content that brings value to your visitors, which could possibly initiate discussions, questions and comments (I’m talking about articulate comments, not cyber-babble)."

In short, the six "steps" are:

Step 1: Short text is a myth

Step 2: Spice up your text with images, not the other way round

Step 3: Hypertext, hypertext, hypertext

Step 4: Good content shows in the title

Step 5: Keywords mean a lot

Step 6: Writing with a reader in mind

Whether you're a content writer or writing content for your own promotion or marketing use, this article is a condensed learning experience (or a great reminder for some of us). The slide show version is from the article version at the Marketing & Innovation blog, a team effort which includes Yann Gourvennec.

6 steps to valuable Internet content

View more OpenOffice presentations from Yann Gourvennec.

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Self-Publishing Success

A self-published book, God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana, won the 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America, a prestigious national honor. Past Spur winners include Larry McMurtry for Lonesome Dove, Michael Blake for Dances With Wolves, Glendon Swarthout for The Shootist, and Tony Hillerman for Skinwalker. The author, Carol Buchanan, receives her award Saturday night at the group's annual convention.

As promised, I contacted Buchanan about this remarkable phenomenon and learned that she had not even attempted traditional publishing, although she is a traditionally published author of nonfiction books. Her insights into self-publishing will either encourage you or knock your socks off. Either way, she graciously shares valuable information and agreed to answer questions about her experience... Read the rest of the Interview With Carol Buchanan.

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Lose and Loose

This one makes me grind my teeth. See the NYT, Wednesday, June 17, "Black Swan Trader Bets on Inflation" jump to page C3, top left col, 6th graf down:

The strategy often either looses money or posts flat returns...

The writer didn't mean that the strategy loosens up money, either. This was a flat out proofreading failure, because the correct word is "loses". However, I see the words confused too often in writing from the youthful and ESLs.

What's the difference between "lose" and "loose", besides one "o"? Both are verbs, and "loose" is also an adjective, indicating free or freedom or unrestrained. Lose (pronounced looz) mainly means an inability to find or keep possession of and a lot of similar connotations. I think it is the long oh sound that confuses users. Both words oo in the middle. "Loose" ends with an ess sound, whereas "lose" ends with a zee sound.

You may lose your loose change through a hole in your pocket.

Does this help to remember the difference? See the man walking along, jingling coins in his pocket and the coins dribbling out from the cuff, scattering on the pavement? See me coming along picking them up? To lose coins, your bad luck. Loose coins, my treasure!

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Endorsed Book Deals

The second book I have endorsed has arrived in physical form, and I found my little blurb listed at the very top the first page of the book. Blow Us Away! won't be available from stores until the end of August. It's offered at Wind River Publishing for $16.95 and is well worth that price. Because I haven't reviewed this book yet, let me quote myself:

Writers who follow Howick's advice will greatly increase their probability of success, both in getting an agent and selling the manuscript to a publisher.

Georganna Hancock, M.S.

More good news: through a special arrangement with the publisher, only A Writer's Edge can advertise these two great deals. The first is for the paperback book at only $11.95 plus shipping: Blow Me Away! in paperback. The electronic version, Blow Me Away! eBook, is offered only to A Writer's Edge viewers for just $9.95.

If you are serious about wanting to get your book published, read what this publisher has to say. He tells you exactly what to do to please those involved with making your book a success. Want to get published? Then get Blow Me Away!

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Social-Digital Books Coming

Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World: "The technology is here. Book nerds are now working on XML-like markup languages that would allow for really terrific linking and mashups. Imagine a world where there's a URL for every chapter and paragraph in a book—every sentence, even."

I don't know whether to cheer or jeer.

This sounds like my introduction to mark up languages in general when I found an example of hypertext on a university site via a dumb terminal in the computer lab where I worked at SDSU. That was around 1991, pretty much pre-WWW. I was hyper over hypertext, although I didn't quite understand what it was and certainly didn't envision the what the web became.

Now I can't live without it. Even my emails are in html (hypertext markup language) and contain hot links.

Hyperbooks? I suppose ...

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Misused Words Make Mary

"I look forward to your incite on this," a client riotously wrote about manuscript changes. Does the erroneous word fit into one of the categories below? Perhaps an eggserroneous (anyone else a fan of the "Ernest..." movies)?

mondegreens not to be confused with collard greens See Lady Mondegreen.

malapropisms legacy of the lovely Mrs. Malaprop

spoonerisms -- named for Reverend Spooner, who would frequently transpose words or parts of words from one part of a sentence to another - with humerous [sic] results. A well known example, is the Reverend, after pronouncing a couple 'man and wife', saying "It is kisstomary to cuss the bride." (source not cited because of the embedded error)

eggcorns my favorite on toast points with Bearnaise sauce

Can anyone pinpoint the two type(s) of word choice errors in this post and any typos I may have inadvertently included? How about concocting a sentence using all four types of lip slips?

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Write About Flag Day

You can tell old folk live at my house. It's the only one on the street with a flag displayed. Flag Day used to be a big deal. What might our country be like if we honored Flag Day as much as Mother's Day and Father's Day. Isn't our country like our parents, worthy of the same respect and love?

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Shakespeare on the Beach

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CliffsNotes® Wired!

CramCasts covering the following works of literature:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

News Release

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Cheaper Books at Scribd

I looked into Scribd.com for publishing Be a Successful Writer! The caliber of other documents offered in the "writing" section did not impress me. In short, I didn't want to be included. It looked like a whole lot of competition with no quality control and no immediate way for customers to know what links were worthwhile exploring. It was for these reasons that I never wrote about the new service.

Last month I mentioned that Linda Dawson had written about Scribd in her newsletter. She was interested in the new book publishing service that allows sales of single chapters. Also in its favor, "Authors can upload their titles and reap an 80% royalty (as opposed to Amazon's Kindle store, which forks over merely 30%)."

Now in an NYT article, Brad Stone reports that Simon & Schuster [disclaimer: I review for S&S] will sell thousands of its titles on Scribd for "20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition." Today 5,000 titles were to be available. Scribd does not set prices and says it will use S&S's digital files to find and remove pirated copies. Nice. When will they do that for the little guys?

Back in March Scribd had announced partnerships also with Random House, Thomas Nelson, Manning, Berrett-Koehler, Workman and other leading publishers. This came only two years after the company was launched. There's still no way for viewers to estimate the value of an item from the initial listings, so a successful run on Scribd still depends on good marketing to drive buyers to the exact listing. I'm rethinking using Scribd.

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Vanity and Misplaced Values

Australian author Graham Storrs wonders What Price Vanity? He begins, "I've been trying to decide lately at what point being published for no fee counts as vanity publishing."

Perhaps Australia has a different definition of "vanity publishing?" At any rate, Storrs muddles getting published without pay and paying to be published, which puts the "vanity" in the type of publishing wherein authors pay someone else to publish their works. I don't care what you call it: participatory, POD, subsidized, vanity, self...

Actually, "self" is a good place to stop and a good word to substitute for "vanity". No matter what the arrangement between you, the author, and anybody else who participates in your work being offered to the public, if you fund any part of the project, you're self-publishing.

Storrs, however, continues to confound the notion of works being published for free with publishing the work yourself:

Presumably, because it is better to have your story published, even for free, than to have it sitting forever on your hard drive. In other words, it's a kind of vanity publishing.

Only if the process is totally automated, as I sometimes suspect it is with those "article marketing" sites. Not only does no one edit the product, possibly they aren't even aware of what their software is doing. Let's all try uploading some severe erotica and see what happens. Or hate lit. Never mind, back to the question of what is vanity publishing.

Storrs plunges on to uploading properly formatted material as eBooks for sale on services like Lulu and Kindle. He notes the lack of editorial support or control, but suggests that if the author pays nothing for the services, it is still not vanity publishing. That's only if you don't consider self-publishing as vanity publishing and place no value on the time and skill to prepare the mss, manage the process, and promote the published work--all jobs undertaken by traditional publishers.

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The Noticer Project

A variation of this review appears at Blogcritics.

Turning 40 seemed to be a traumatic event. I faced it by inviting to dinner the ten women who had most influenced my life. My mother, my daughter, and my therapist joined me at a Benihana, and I never needed to visit another such restaurant. Now my mother is dead, the therapist and I lost touch, and my daughter doesn't speak to me. So much for noticing the important people in life, and turning 40 was nada compared to subsequent life events.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is relevant to an interesting book I just read, The Noticer by Andy Andrews. It's a quick, easy read, not literary but not crap, either. One little story made me stop to think about myself, my life, and my relationships with others. That is a pretty historic event right there. No other motivational material has so influenced me since discovering Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I can't tell you what the book is about, because it is simply a narration of several loosely connected stories concerning an old man who delivers little lessons on life principles to needy people. I don't think he offers anything for which you can't cite a 12-Step aphorism. (12-Steppers have a handy saying for every situation.) Some of the notions I have already discovered for myself, but then I'm 65 years old. So maybe this book might help younger people avoid some of the pain I've caused myself. Would they listen? Would they understand? Did I? Obviously not. And a couple principles require faith that I simply don't have, so I disagree with them.

Associated with this book is The Noticer Project. It asks you to list up to five people who most influenced your life and to notice them. Never mind that the noticing in the book is by the old man observing other people. You can even do the noticing publicly, online. Before I visited the site, I came up with this list (much better than the one I made when I was 40):

Albert Schweitzer
Margaret Mead
Bertrand Russell
Anne Wilder
Stephen Covey

Four of these are well-known. Ms. Wilder was my mentor for a quite few years. She was one of those special people who bring out the best in others. She was also a topnotch bureau chief and a crack news reporter, mainly with The Miami Herald.

I willingly surfed to the site, only to discover that the people you want to notice need to have email addresses. Most of mine are dead! I think that says something about the quality of the lives they led and their lasting influence on the world.

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What Good is Twitter?

And other social media? Before I grudgingly dragged myself over to sign up with Twitter, I kept reading about how useful it is. But no one offered any details. Everyone said things like "you'll find out how to use it for yourself." Big help, huh?

As with LinkedIn, I'm sorry I waited so long to jump into these turbulent waters. For an early adopter of technology, I'm surely slow with the social aspects.

I consider Twitter as the world's biggest chatroom. If you're in business, you need to have a Twitter account--and to use it and monitor messages to it. It's the 911 for instant communication, research, connections for any kind of writer.

Here's how Twitter has saved my bacon a few times:

One place my book reviews appear is on the Blogcritics.org. New software on the site was giving me a fit. The Help was no help. Editors were unavailable. I was ready to scream. Then I thought: Twitter? Although still unfamiliar with all it's workings, I searched on the website's name and found an account for it, direct mailed it and lo, the Big Man himself intervened. In a few minutes. (A day later an editor responded.)

Another day I was about to publish a post recommending a new service at another website. All I had was the base URL to the site. Thought I'd better check out the special part myself. After many minutes (waiting to upload the post to my blog, mind you) I could find nothing, no link, no mention, no part of a site map that correlated. And the plug was plugged in! A "Top Priority" email to the PR person brought no response (ever!). Once again I consulted Twitter, found an account for the correct company and shot off a question. While I worked on a couple of other posts, someone at the company noticed they were about to lose out on possibly valuable free advertising unless they responded to a Twitter chirp. They did, and the post went up touting a new source of reading material for tech-type readers.

In both cases, I was pleased with speedy dependable research results. They enabled me to multitask, keep on working on a particular critical piece, and do my "job" in a timely fashion. And this is just one little example of what Twitter does for me.

When communicating with a friend, client, colleague, source, supplier, or representative, the messaging often flows back and forth between and among Twitter and email. Throw in the third party applications I've accumulated thusfar and I can carry on multiple conversations simultaneously with TweetGrid or monitor just one input stream; or work in my blogging program and get TweetFox instant messages in the lower right corner of the screen, and once a week go to a big meeting of editors in a TweetChat room.

All this has only to do with business communication. I'm beginning to think I could write a book about the handy uses for Twitter and other social media for issues other than socializing.

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Books on eBay

Ever wonder what happens to all those books I receive for reviews? Too often I keep them. Many go to a couple of libraries that I support. Others show up on Amazon. Now I'm making a foray into eBay. I don't see how anyone would find a group of books like I am offering. The eBay search engine seems a hopeless jungle of preferences and cautions. A literary gold minefield.

I've stumbled through trying to get this listing up for a couple of weeks. The "gallery photo" won't display much of the time. I don't care--these are six different contemporary novels in trade paperback size. All are in perfect condition. The auction runs until about 8:30 EDT/5:30 PDT next Sunday. All six for one money!

For the copy and paste crowd, see the ad here:

6 NEW BOOKS Advance Reviewer Copies--5 novels, 1 nonfic - eBay (item 330336220904 end time Jun-14-09 17:31:16 PDT)

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Elusion, Allusion, Illusion

Interpret the title. I'm not suggesting that you evade capturing references to dreams. These three words, and their verbal variants of elude and allude and even illude, are often confused and used incorrectly. Allusion and illusion are especially prone to misplacement and elude and allude, similarly.

Elude, elusion -- to avoid capture; a deception or evasion
Allude, allusion -- to refer to; an indirect reference
Illude, illusion -- to deceive or trick; a false view

Confusion is understandable. Two of the three words have to do with deception and the third, illusion, sounds like allusion and elusion. May mistakes in written grammar begin with us hearing words before we see them used correctly in print.

In the "Mistaken Words" section of Daily Writing Tips, these words are described as variations of a base that means "play". I prefer to focus on the distraction/deception aspect as being easier to understand and, perhaps, to remember.

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Roget's II Online

Yes, I use the Big Words every once in a while. What? It can't hurt you to look one up now and then. Expand your vocabulary. It make for richer description, dialogue, and characters in your writing. Start with a word you know and find some synonyms:

Roget's II: The New Thesaurus is now online.

One can be more precise, express oneself more colorfully, or avoid repetition.

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Postmodernism

The largest amount of gobbledy gook I've seen since my own master's thesis:

The Postmodernism Generator

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Writers Beware: StRaTeGiCbOoKPuBliShInG

While I was checking my listing at Kudzu (to send to a new client), I scrolled down the page. An ad caught my eye:

Don't Self-Publish Yet

Traditional Publisher Seeks New Authors, Fast Decisions.

www.StRaTeGiCbOoKPuBliShInG.com

Because I could scarcely decipher the company's name (first warning), I clicked to read about this incredible traditional publisher that needs to advertise to find books to publish (second big red flag). Just gazing at the web page design, I immediately thought "New York Literary Agency" (not a good connotation).

A short hop and I discovered that this [monkey] business is associated with Eloquent Books, Strategic Book Marketing, and probably more, all under the aegis of the AEG Publishing Group, which purportedly announced last fall that they had bought The Literary Agency Group! That name was either the umbrella or one of the many variations the NYLA uses. Wow! Put them all together, and their reputations speak volumes.

Just for laughs, see the AEG listing at Preditors and Editors. I would tag this post "silly" and run it tomorrow, except for the sad looks I've seen on faces when I let people know they have been taken in by one of these companies' scams. So sue me!

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Reviewing the Books

Carol Buchanan must be thinking, "Finally!" A review of her award-winning historical fiction, Book Review: God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana went up on Blogcritics late last night. Next project: interviewing Buchanan about why she went with self-publishing. This is her first published fiction and, right out of the gate, it won her the 2009 Spur Award for Best First Novel given by the Western Writers of America. I guarantee the information Buchanan has to offer other new novelists contemplating self-publishing is vital and riveting.

The nice people who run the Midwest Book Review website dedicated a section for my offerings in the Reviewer's Bookwatch. I don't know if my reviews are included in any of the other review collections the MBR publishes (print or digital), and I haven't quite figured out the site's organization, so I don't know if there is a method for finding all my reviews other than the site's search service. My reviews there are not always the same as the ones on Blogcritics.org.

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Make Your Writing Mark

Part of branding your writing or your persona can be deciding on a logo as a trademark. You may also want to protect a unique catch phrase like the description of A Writer's Edge post as "a concentrated knowledge pill that takes you to the edge of the writing universe" that I tried out the other day. A book's subtitle is another example of a phrase to use as a trademark or a service mark.

"But," I hear you wondering, "Should I register my mark?" Much like copyrights, you don't need to register to be protected, but it helps when you go to court. No one wants to contemplate needing to sue, but consider the fee to register like an insurance premium.

Looking at trademarks from the other direction, you might want to brush up on the Fair Use of Trademarks to ensure your writing does not infringe on someone else's rights. Using another's trademark in a fiction work may bring an additional sense of realism to the work or it may be essential when it is used in a non-fiction work. (Lloyd L. Rich in The Publishing Law Center.) You need to know how far you can go without obtaining permission.

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James Ellroy's Los Angeles

Playboy Walkabout - James Ellroy's Los Angeles --Warning: Adult Material XXX:

James Ellroy is the critically acclaimed author of My Dark Places, American Tabloid, The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential. In The Hilliker Curse—Ellroy's four-part memoir running in the April, June, September and November 2009 issues of Playboy—the modern dean of noir delves into his tangled sexual and romantic history. In the first installment of Playboy's new writers series Walkabout, Ellroy invites our readers to visit the places in Los Angeles that haunt him and to meet the ghosts that possess him still.

*****

In Los Angeles, you can take tours of the haunts of dead writers and their characters, but Ellroy is a living legend and conducts his own tour. A unique opportunity.

Books on Amazon by James Ellroy

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Tianaman Square Anniversary Book

From my review on Blogcritics:

Twenty years ago on June 4, 1989, the Chinese military took brutal action against student demonstrators in Beijing's Tianamen Square. Many Americans who watched the unthinkable atrocities can only recall watching the People's Liberation Army tanks running over students....Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China is Diane Wei Liang's memoir of that time in China, of her own role in the Student Democracy Movement...and of the friends and lovers who stood beside her and made history on that terrible day.

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Housekeeping @ A Writer's Edge

If you've noticed problems with the RSS delivery of this blog in the last week, it was a combo of me changing the template and rearranging posts, as well as some Blogger problem that is supposedly now fixed, FeedBlitz announced. Online viewers, notice the difference? O.K., but the page should be easier to read, less cluttered, and provide for slightly longer posts.

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Ten Buck Books

Dime store novels are now ten buck books. The engrossing, inexpensive paperbacks were ubiquitous at Woolworths and neighborhood corner stores; all disappeared at the end of the last century/millennium.

Amazon Kindle customers have roared that they draw the line at paying more than $9.99 to download a book into their electronic readers.

The Book of the Month® (now owned by Bookspan) has a new program offering bestsellers at $9.95. I presume these are hardbacks.

According to a release sent last week, eMusic has expanded its MP3 audiobooks catalog, including some recent bestsellers via Recorded Books (the world's largest independent publisher and distributor of unabridged audio books), HighBridge Audio, and others. Customers can sign up for monthly subscriptions priced at $9.99 for one book or $19.99 for two books - and get one bonus book as part of an introductory offer.

Now, if only the supermarkets would have those "10 for $10" loss leader sales on ten buck books!

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Lulu Sells on Amazon

An author-friend recently received this message from Lulu.com:

Congratulations, your book has been selected for listing on Amazon.com's Marketplace! As a result, your book will now be easily found on the world's largest online bookseller.

There will be some differences between your listing on Lulu and your listing on Amazon. Amazon charges a fee to list your book, and in order to cover that cost your book will be listed with a 30% markup; however your royalty will remain the same, and your book's price on Lulu will not change. Furthermore, your book sales on Amazon will reflect in your Lulu account immediately.

Lulu is committed to helping you increase your book's sales and we hope you enjoy the benefits of listing your book on Amazon.com

Apparently the 30% markup covers the cost for a Lulu book to be listed on Amazon, as well as Amazon's royalty cut. Lulu authors are still paid according to their Lulu contracts. I'd think the greater visibility would offset the higher price, resulting in more sales. No? Yes? Maybe.

And how does this accord with Amazon's new policy of not listing self-published books unless they are printed by its BookSurge printing unit? The world's largest online bookstore's practice doesn't seem to be slowing down Lightning Source, the on-demand book printing unit of Ingram publishing services. In May it started delivering digital books on compact Espresso digital printing devices in some retail outlets and libraries.

The book publishing industry is changing so fast, you can't keep up, even with a scorecard.

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Clients Today

Sadly, all too true!

From YouTube

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Happy Birthday to AWE

A Writer's Edge is

Five Years Old Today!

Best Wishes for Friends,
Fans, Followers,

RSS and Email Receivers,
and all Visitors!

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Bing ... Binging?

If MSN's new (new? When did "Live" go out of beta?) search engine is called "Bing", does that mean when we use it, we'll be binging? Bingging? Bingeing?

If "bing" is verbed-up, how shall we spell it? Where is an editor when you need one?

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