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Conservatives need to stop hiding in the 'woke' publishing industry

americanthinker.com – Friday November 18, 2022

The publishing industry has always swung somewhat left, but in recent years, it has become so far left that even moderate writers are tossed aside.  No matter how inadequate their work is, activists posing as authors secure deals lecturing the general public for the sin of being human.

There are millions of conservatives out there who struggle to find modern books they can both learn from and enjoy.  There is a huge hole in the industry because agents ignore readers who seek content with traditional values that doesn't just preach at the reader.

[Read the full article]

10 Tips for Publishing Your First Book

theamericanreporter.com – Monday November 14, 2022

Are you thinking about publishing your first book? If so, you’re in good company!

Every year, thousands of people make the decision to become authors. Publishing a book can be a great way to share your ideas with the world and build your brand. However, it’s not always easy to know where to start. That’s why we’ve put together this list of 10 tips for publishing your first book.

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I tried writing with AI. The results were surprising

fastcompany.com – Friday November 11, 2022

Prolific author Herbert Lui says that amid a lot of incoherence, and even occasional insensitive and even hateful text fragments, there was one particularly exciting response.

“Don’t like to write, but like having written,” is a quote that has stood the test of time for writers. I’ve written my own book Creative Doing, I write at my blog every day, and I’ve led teams of writers and editors for years, so I actually really enjoy writing. However, I totally understand where the pain comes from. It’s an expensive pain, which is why ghostwriting can be such a lucrative endeavor; just a couple of weeks before I wrote this, Business Insider interviewed a ghostwriter that earned over $200,000 in 2021 writing tweets for venture capitalists.

Ghostwriting isn’t the only solution; there are plenty of others. One of the most exciting ones is the rise of AI writers. One of the latest named Lex, made by Nathan Baschez, has over 26,000 people signed up for it in its launch week. Lex is the latest in many other AI writing software, including Copy.aiSnazzy AI, and ShortlyAI, all powered by the GPT-3 natural language processor. There’s even AI writing for programmers; over 90 million people use GitHub Copilot.

It’s a trend that’s been developing for years. K Allado-McDowell has coauthored two books with GPT-3, Almira Osmanovic Thunström at Scientific American prompted GPT-3 to write an academic paper, and Vauhini Vara wrote a story about her sister’s death, a topic she couldn’t bring herself to write about for years. 

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Writing Grief in Fiction is a Work of Love

lithub.com – Friday November 11, 2022

On a weekday morning in February, age twelve, I was shunted from the warm ignorance of sleep and propelled into a world where my Uncle Theo no longer existed. My mother’s keening was the thing that woke me; a sound I had never before heard or simply neglected to remember before that time. A sound that, from that moment, became part of everything I would associate with mourning; with grief.

The memory I have is of standing at the foot of my parents’ bed, barefoot and frightened, watching my father do his best to console my mother. I was invisible and I think even then, as a child, I understood something new and terrible: grief is the same colour as madness. It moulds us in ways we did not think we could bend. It is not neat and its messiness can be alarming. Following the death of my Uncle Theo, there were other losses, each one a simultaneously unique yet familiar blow to our collective gut.

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How to navigate the writer-editor relationship

artshub.co.uk – Monday November 7, 2022

Consider: you’ve just had your first or latest book accepted by a publishing house (congratulations!) and you’ve been assigned an editor to finesse the manuscript into publishable form. Or you’re a newbie editor who’s at the start of your career and wanting to know how to navigate the potentially tricky conversations with writers who are understandably a little protective about their words.

ArtsHub has gathered voices on both sides of the publication divide to offer some tips on how to successfully manage the writer-editor relationship.

[Read the full article]

Lee Child and Andrew Child on Discipline, Dread, and Writing Late at Night

crimereads.com – Wednesday October 26, 2022

Lee and Andrew Child’s new book, No Plan B, was released earlier today, so we asked them a few questions about writing routine, advice, and influence.

What time of day do you write (and why)?

Lee Child: I’m ruled by my biological clock, which mandates one unshakeable conclusion: nothing of value is ever achieved in the morning. Typically I get up late and spend a couple of hours moving from a comatose state into something resembling human life. Then I’ll start work about 1 or 2 in the afternoon. I have learned to sense the point when quality starts to diminish, which is usually about 6 hours later, so I’ll stop then. Often I get a second energy peak around midnight, so I’ll do another couple of hours before bed, especially in the later stages when the story is really rolling. Usually a book takes between 80 and 90 working days, spread out over about 7 months.

Andrew Child: My favorite time to write is at night. I like it best when darkness falls and the world shrinks down to the size of the pool of light that spills from my laptop screen. That just leaves me alone with the story I’m telling, nothing to distract, nothing to interfere.

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It’s Time To Save Literature From The Woke Publishing Industry

thefederalist.com – Tuesday October 25, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates is a fixture in American letters — she’s won the National Book Award, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, the Jerusalem Prize, and she’s been nominated for the Pulitzer five times. She taught at Princeton for 36 years, and is, of course, an outspoken Trump critic. A Google search for “Joyce Carol Oates” and “feminist” yields more than half a million results.

And even she thinks the publishing industry has become intolerably politically correct. On Twitter, she recently observed, the “category of straight white males is the only category remaining for villains & awful people in fiction & film & popular culture.” Oates isn’t alone in observing the problem — in June, ubiquitous author James Patterson, whose potboilers have sold more than 400 million copies, said white male writers now face “another form of racism” in the woke publishing industry, before he was bullied into backtracking on his comments.

Of course, if you’ve set foot in a large bookstore recently, what Patterson is saying has obvious merit. On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, a friend actually took photos and counted up the books on the six new fiction shelves displayed up front. Male authors made up less than 25 percent of the nearly 200 books displayed in the front of the store, and obviously, the percentage of men who were white and/or heterosexual was notably smaller than that.

Oates and Patterson are only now saying what many men with literary ambitions have long known. Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Alex Perez recently gave a scorched-earth interview to the Hobart Literary Journal where he discussed how male-centric literature was being deliberately shut out of publishing. During the interview, he had some choice words for the woke and disproportionately female gatekeepers of the industry:

[Read the full article]

Andrew Wylie, ‘The Jackal’ of books: ‘Amazon is like ISIS; it takes no prisoners’

english.elpais.com – Sunday October 23, 2022

The world’s leading literary agent speaks about Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Donald Trump and the e-commerce giant

Among the literary giants included under the letter B on Andrew Wylie’s endless client list are Giorgio Bassani, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, Paul and Jane Bowles, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs and Roberto Bolaño, eight of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Under C, one finds Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Italo Calvino and Albert Camus. Andrew Wylie, 74, is the world’s most powerful literary agent. His agency has offices in New York and London, and they employ 50 people. His reputation for ruthlessness in managing his clients’ rights has earned him a nickname in the publishing industry: the Jackal. However, he maintains that his goal is to defend authors whose books are of high literary quality but don’t often sell many copies. He asks the new agents he hires to prioritize the emotions that a book arouses in them, not how well they think it might sell.

Nobody, living or dead, has a list of clients as impressive as Wylie’s, which includes Milan Kundera, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Yasmina Reza, Shakespeare, Orhan Pamuk, Susan Sontag and Louise Glück. The agency represents so many luminaries that Wylie is unable to recall off the top of his head how many Nobel Prize-winning authors he counts as clients.

[Read the full article]

Why querying is hell for neurodivergents

thebookseller.com – Monday October 17, 2022

Literary agencies have taken steps to make their submissions policies more inclusive—and some simple adjustments can throw the doors wide open.

Querying: the word itself makes it seem straightforward. You query an agent—“Hey, would you like to represent my novel?”—and they say yes or no. It’s actually incredibly complicated, consisting of learning unique skills and new acronyms like R&R, FR and CNR. If you don’t know the terminology either, R&R is revise and resubmit, FR can be a full request or a full rejection and CNR is could not reply. Querying can make you consider: is my love for this book worth the challenges of pursuing publication?

Querying being difficult is not an experience unique to neurodivergent people and may not be everyone’s experience, since every neurodivergent person is fundamentally different—it’s in the name. But this article offers an insight into how agents can make the process more accessible and inclusive. The problems start early because there isn’t a set “guide” and no clear benchmark to measure how you are progressing. The percentage of partial or full requests a querying author may receive might be good for YA fantasy but not for adult cosmic horror, and it can change month on month. Add to this varied, long and intense wait times and it can cause serious issues for neurodivergent writers.

[Read the full article]

Ketubot 99 - Tablet Magazine

tabletmag.com – Thursday October 13, 2022

Today’s Talmud page, Ketubot 99, ponders the complicated, sometimes fraught, and often fruitful relationship between clients and agents. Literary agent Anne Edelstein joins us to talk about helping her authors navigate their careers, a journey that requires profound psychological insights. So what is it, exactly, that an agent does? Listen and find out.

[Read the full article]

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