Harlan Ellison, My Hero
Seressia November 29th, 2007
Don’t you sometimes wish you could say what you really feel? Well, Harlan Ellison can. Check out this excerpt from the bioflick Dreams With Sharp Teeth. (I warn you, this audio is not work safe.)
Archive for November, 2007
Textually Promiscuous
Seressia November 28th, 2007
Publisher’s Weekly ran a nice article on readers of romance and the various subgenres. I think it’s definitely worth a read-through, especially this comment by Shauna Summers of Bantam Dell:
If there’s a catch in this ever-widening, perpetually cross-pollinating category, it’s this: all this variety may have crowded out a so-called subgenre that was once the staple—contemporary romance. It seems that writers are so dazzled by werewolves and castles that a modern-day hero and heroine is simply not so common. “We’re actively looking for stand-alone single titles, and we’re just not seeing them,” Summers at Bantam Dell says. “Part of the reason may be that contemporary romance has cross-pollinated with women’s fiction. In the books that come close, the tone, structure and focus of romance is hard to find.”
Beverly Jenkins Week
Seressia November 28th, 2007
It’s Beverly Jenkins Week over at Lifetime’s Romance B(u)y the Book. And she’s guest blogging today (Wednesday). Go check it out. Why? Because she’s Beverly effin’ Jenkins!
Karen Thomas Answers PW’s Three Questions
Seressia November 26th, 2007
Karen Thomas, an executive editor at Grand Central Publishing, answered three questions from Publisher’s Weekly. Of the three, this was most interesting:
PW: How do you perceive the differences between black and white readers?
KT: I think with some titles, depending on the genre, the gap is closing. A lot of the books I’ve been dealing with are targeted somewhat to a younger market, and because, I think, of the hip-hop generation, the differences aren’t as great as they used to be…What I do know is that people love pop culture, whether you’re black or white. So if you put a pop culture book out there, it’s going to sell across the board. When you have different celebrities, their core market may be African-American, but it crosses the board.
NBC News Talks About Black Women
Seressia November 25th, 2007
“NBC News With Brian Williams” will air a five-part series on African-American Women and Where They Stand. Each night will cover a particular topic including education, health, and gender disparity among other things.
Mara Schiavocampo, Digital Correspondent for “Nightly News,” will address two hot topics in the African - American community: interracial dating and the impact of hip hop music on black women (For those of you who attended NABJ this year, Ms. Schiavocampo won the Emerging Journalist of the Year Award). Interracial dating is a growing trend in the African - American community. An Essence.com poll found that 81% of participants approved of black women dating non- black men. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report in 2000, 95,000 black women were married to white men. In 2005, that number increased to 134,000. Schiavocampo will talk to experts about the trend and discuss how this defines the “Black family” of the future.
Schiavocampo will convene a panel of leading black men and women from the hip-hop industry for an engaging discussion on whether hip hop lyrics and videos positively or negatively affect black women. The roundtable also will address how these portrayals are affecting relationships between black women and black men.
I guess since Schiavocampo is a Digital Correspondent, her segments will only be available online instead of on TV. Hey, I guess we should be glad these things are being discussed at all.
Show Me the Money!
Seressia November 25th, 2007
From Brenda Hiatt:
**Permission to Forward**
At long last, I’ve finally managed to transfer all of my “Show Me The Money” data from over 300 accumulated pages in a word processing document to Excel. (Yes, it took months.) Once that was done, I was able to drop out all the pre-2000 advance figures and refigure average advances and earnouts, as well as adding a new median figure for each (where I had enough data to justify that). And :::drumroll::: it’s now up on my website! People have been pestering for an update for over a year now, so I thought a general announcement was called for. Enjoy!
Updates will be easier (MUCH easier) from now on, so I hope to do this a lot more often. So definitely keep sending me your data! What I specifically need for each book is:
-
Publisher/line
Year (or projected year) of release
Which book it is of yours/for that publisher (1st, 5th, etc.)
Advance
Standard royalty percentage (for regular retail sales)
Total earnout to date (INCLUDING advance)
Last 4 digits of ISBN # (not included in handout–this helps me spot duplicates)
As always, everything will be kept totally confidential–I strip names before I even paste the figures into my file for the next update.
Thanks for your patience, everyone!
–Brenda 
www.brendahiatt.com
The Future of the Book
Seressia November 24th, 2007
Newsweek has a story featuring the guy many consider equal parts literary pioneer and devil, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and his new ebbok reader, the Kindle. It’s worth a glance-through (but if you want an in-depth review of Amazon’s Kindle, I point you to Dear Author’s detailed opinion/review of the device.) There were a few things in the Newsweek article that stood out to me.
Jeff Bezos’ wife is a novelist. You’d think she’d influence him somewhat about those used book sales, but maybe she makes enough money to not care.
This also caught my eye:
Amazon has worked hard to get publishers to step up efforts to release digital versions of new books and backlists, and more than 88,000 will be on sale at the Kindle store on launch. (Though Bezos won’t get terribly specific, Amazon itself is also involved in scanning books, many of which it captured as part of its groundbreaking Search Inside the Book program. But most are done by the publishers themselves, at a cost of about $200 for each book converted to digital. New titles routinely go through the process, but many backlist titles are still waiting. “It’s a real chokepoint,” says Penguin CEO David Shanks.) Amazon prices Kindle editions of New York Times best sellers and new releases in hardback at $9.99.
This is important news to writers with backlists, especially if they have books out of print. Especially when you consider that Amazon’s goal is to make every book ever created available for it’s reader, even books out of print. Any writer who knows the struggle of trying to get their rights reverted back when their books go out of print should be concerned about this and check their contracts. When you hit a certain level in your career, your backlist becomes. Bottom line: check your contract for electronic format “and any format hereinafter invented” clauses and get them to be at least mutually eneficial, even if your publisher doesn’t do ebooks. Because you don’t know what will happen five years from now.
This is also important to readers. Who pays $10 for an ebook? Why would I, when I can get a hardcover through my bookclub for the same price? The majority of my fiction books, particularly new writers I’m trying, I buy in mass market or trade. I also don’t follow authors into hardcover–if I started a series in MM, I’m gonna wait for that book to be released in MM. In my pinion, an ebook should be comparable in price to a mass market.
One of the things they talked about was trying to figure out how to get advertising into electronic books. I have issues with this on multiple levels. One, would the author get a cut of that advertising dollar? It’s her story after all. Would she be able to approve who gets to advertise in her book? Two, as a consumer, I don’t like getting advertised to in something that I own, which is why I rarely buy DVDs, especially since you can’t skip through the ads to get to the start of the movie. Same with seeing movies in theaters. I pay my $9.50, show me previews, but don’t advertise golden arches.
The article wraps up with the future of ebooks, and it doesn’t sound all that beneficial to writers. One of the future visions is that the author becomes more of a “superuser” directing the creative process but no longer the sole progenitor of the work. I can see this in non-fiction, but fiction by its very nature, is the product of a person with the ability to visualize a concept and translate it into words for others to consume. I could imagine doing a “fan fest” book as a one-time event, especially if I had a beloved series with hundreds of thousands of fans. (Hey, I could dream.)
Finally, Newsweek’s Steven Levy had a live discussion on the state of the book on Tuesday. You can read the transcript here.
Just breathe
Seressia November 23rd, 2007
So there was a period of about an hour this morning in which I believed that my oldest nephew, helping me in my pre-Thanksgiving cleaning frenzy, took several boxes to the trash. It was only this morning as I was preparing to start my writing weekend, that I realized I was missing a black tote with a couple of my notebooks in it.
So of course I recreated the mess we’d cleaned up in an effort to find said tote bag, only to have a sinking feeling that it had been a casualty of the make-house-look-nice-for-guests mandate. These two notebooks contain the beginnings of the sequel to Dream of Shadows and my third entry for the Vegas Bites trilogy anthology, both of which need to be worked on this weekend. Because they’re both due at the beginning of the year.
So thinking that these notebooks were currently being incinerated, needless to say, filled me with a certain panic. Sure I know how each story is supposed to progress, but sometimes it hard to get back the way the words were written, the momentum back.
And I know some of you are thinking, “why didn’t she just work on her computer? This wouldn’t have happened.” Well, computers crash (check), jump drives can break or get wonky (double-check) or you can crack your laptop monitor (triple-check win the t-shirt). Besides, te paper notebooks are great for taking to the coffeeshop and maximizing my lunch break at work. And when I’m facing writer’s block or deadlines or creative slumps, putting pen to paper and unchaining my mind is very freeing.
So you see why I needed those notebooks back.
After an hour of going through the coat closet, the sunroom closet, the office closet, the linen closet, and the two closets in my bedroom, I finally found the tote bag in a storage crate at the back of the second closet. I hugged that tote bag like a long lost lover. Then I ran downstairs to put a little Irish in my coffee.
So I apologize to my nephew for thinking he’d tossed my tote bag. And I think the moral of this story is to let sleeping piles lie. After all, it’s only when I clean up that I can’t find anything.
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Readin’, Writin’, Racism, Romance ~ pt 3
Seressia November 20th, 2007
No, this won’t be the full-out “Are Black Romances Different?” post. My brain just isn’t able to wrap around it right now, and I’m supposed to be writing an article for Blogging in Black. Maybe over the holiday, which will be devoted to writing. I think I’m looking forward to it.
Monica Jackson made a post in reference to RWA’s romance statistics. I think they’ve been out about a month or so now, and a new company compiled them.
One of the big differences in the statistics is that the huge number we loved to quote is no longer there. We used to be able to say, “Romances account for 51% of all mass market books sold.” Now the report says, “Romance accounts for 26.4% of all books sold.” The problem with the second one is that you have to think too hard and long about it to realize that’s a great share of the market. Saying that more than half of all paperbacks sold are romances just sounds better.
One of the big same-old, same-olds is that black romances aren’t accounted for. As Monica states, I’m sure this could be because a) RWA didn’t specify for the research company to separate that category out; and b) RWA doesn’t consider black romances a separate category, and it is either that 5% of other or the numbers or the different types are rolled into their respective categories.
I do find Option B a bit more difficult to believe for several reasons: Publishers and some bookstores consider black romances separate, hence the separate shelving, lines, and marketing. Two, the same venues don’t separate the types of black romances, so contemporaries, historicals, and paranormals are just lumped under the umbrella of black romance.
I’m talking print published here; epublishing is another animal entirely. I’m also not talking romances by non-black authors featuring black heroines (and some heroes) which are racked in with regular romances and are more than likely accounted for in their respective subgenres.
Anyway, it’s late, and I’m rambling now. Go and read Monica’s take. Then, when you’ve had your fill of Black Friday, come on back to my website to read my version of Black Friday. I’ll probably even have the long-awaited post up.
Congrats Brenda Jackson
Seressia November 16th, 2007
For being on the USA Today extended best seller list with
| 128. |  |
Slow Burn |
| Brenda Jackson, St. Martin’s Press | ||
| Romance: Woman’s search for her biological brother leads her to a new life (F) (P) $6.99 |
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