|

Superstars Writing Seminar DVDs

ByJohn Brown

Aspiring authors, I wasn’t able to attend, but heard from a few who were that the Superstars Writing Seminar in Pasadena with Eric Flint, Brandon Sanderson, Dave Wolverton, Rebecca Moesta, and Kevin J. Andersen was EXCELLENT. 

See clips of parts of the videos here (still a lot of good info): http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2F211054CBD822A8

Purchase the full recordings on DVD or MP3 here: www.writerscanon.com

Topics include:

  • Econ 201 for Writers: Economics of Commercial Publishing
  • Inside Editors: How editors look at manuscripts, novels & short fiction
  • Dirty Secrets: What you need to know about being a Professional Author
  • From Slushpile to #1 New York Times Bestseller in 4 Years
  • Intellectual Property: How to Exploit Yours
  • Balancing Acts: Writing World & Real World
  • Agents: the A Word
  • Networking for Writers
  • Self-Promotion for Authors
  • Novel Contracts
  • Self-Publishing: Realities & Pitfalls
  • Pitching the Big Proposal
  • Two Heads Are Better than One: Collaborative Writing
  • New Media: Using It to Get an Edge
  • E-Publishing
  • Movies, TV and Authors
  • Anatomy of a Major Book Release
  • Myths of Publishing
  • Eleven Tips to Increase Your Writing Productivity
Share

Similar Posts

  • Witchbreaker by Author James Maxey

    ByJohn Brown

    I’m supposed to do this tag thing where one author tells about his or her latest project and then tags other authors to tell about theirs and so on and so on until we turn into some weird internet author borg and eat your brains out. 

    Heck with that.

    I want to simply share something cool with you instead. James Maxey (who tagged me in the borg fest) writes stories with lots of action, fun, and character that also make you think. They always start with a bang and never let up. For example, look at how GREATSHADOW, his last book, starts.

    When Infidel grabbed me by the seat of my pants and charged toward the window, I didn’t protest. Partly this was due to the speed of her action, but mostly due to my inebriation from the sacramental wine we’d stolen.

    If an opening like that isn’t going to make you want to read more, I don’t know what will. Especially when the wine was stolen from a lava-pygmy temple carved into the sheer cliff face of a volcano.  I’m not alone in my appreciation of Maxey’s writing. Orson Card wrote this glowing review of GREATSHADOW earlier this year.

    Here is the opening to Maxey’s “To The East, A Bright Star” which was published in Asimov’s.  It has one of my favorite beginnings.

    There was a shark in the kitchen. The shark wasn’t huge, maybe four feet long, gliding across the linoleum toward the refrigerator. Tony stood motionless in the knee-deep water of the dining room. The Wolfman said that the only sharks that came in this far were bull sharks, which were highly aggressive. Tony leaned forward cautiously and shut the door to the kitchen. He’d known the exact time and date of his death for most of his adult life. With only hours to go, he wasn’t about to let the shark do something ironic.  

    Which brings us to the fact that Maxey has another book out called WITCHBREAKER. That’s such a cool title I wish I could off Maxey and steal it for myself. The book has, as you have seen to the right, a fabulous cover as well. About 5000% better than the horrid thing Solaris put on GREATSHADOW.

    Maxey talks about what inspired WITCHBREAKER in this blog post, which I recommend you read in full. But just in case you’re a lazy son-of-a-gun like me, here’s the meat of the thing. WITCHBREAKER is about a woman named Sorrow. Says Maxey:

    Her father was a judge who hung his own mother after she was accused of being a witch. Sorrow rebelled by becoming a witch herself, but her hatred isn’t directed directly at her father, it’s directed at the religious and political institutions that empowered him. So, Sorrow’s life mission is to overthrow that system. She’s one woman against the world, fighting to make it a better place even though everyone she meets keeps insisting that the world isn’t so bad. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for characters locked into a lifelong battle against forces more powerful than they will ever be.

    Blast that dang Maxey and his character genius. I’m not envious at all. No, sir. Which is why I suggest you give Maxey a go. Maybe you’ll appreciate him as much as thousands of other readers do. Read the first few pages of WITCHBREAKER here with Amazon’s look inside.

    Share

  • In writing, profanity is a tool, but not the only tool

    ByJohn Brown

    In this week’s Writing Excuses comments, a poster named Sam asked:

    How do you, as writers, get past your own inhibitions concerning the use of profanity in order to write a character who does use it?

    Why get past them?

    Any given audience has values (as do you as a writer). Stomp on the values too much and you will make the readers so uncomfortable or angry that their discomfort will outweigh the draw of the story. They will put you down and never read you again. For one audience it’s gore. Another it’s explicit sex or vulgarity. For another it’s the bashing of a political stance or a particular demographic.

    If you or your audience is uncomfortable with profanity then say “he swore” OR find another way to convey the information the profanity does.

    Writing works by evoking types in the reader’s mind (as well as type resistors for surprise, curiosity, humor, etc.). Trigger a type and all the data associated with that type comes with it. Profanity is one way to trigger a type (or work against type) in the reader’s mind. But there are many other ways to evoke that same type, many ways to produce the same effect. Language, especially profanity, is a powerful and efficient method, but it’s not the only one.

    You want a mean cruel man? You can have him call his wife a “cu**” all the time. OR you can just show him doing something cruel to her or slapping her, e.g. he grabs her by the neck and makes her look at the food on his plate up close like some pet owners do to dogs when they crap where they shouldn’t–”Does that look like beef stroganoff to you? Stupid whore.”

    Look at Prison Break. Teddy needed to be scary. Profanity could have helped trigger his character. After all, cons use a lot of profanity. But Prison Break was prime time so the writers used other things to evoke the types they needed. Teddy worked for the purposes of that story. All of the cons did. They were believable. And all that without a deluge of profanity.

    Stay away from replacement profanity that evokes a different type. For example, if you had Teddy using “darn it” all the time, unless it was part of some particular character attribute, it would have not been believable because it evokes the wrong type, e.g. Ned Flanders.

    So if you don’t want to use profanity, don’t. Think about your objective and find another type trigger.

    Share

  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy

    ByJohn Brown

    If I’d known Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, I might not have picked it up. So many books that have won the award just bore my underpowered literary sensibilities to death. Luckily, I’d listened to McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses a few years ago and enjoyed it. So when I saw the audio book, performed by Tom Stechschulte, in the library I checked it out. I’m so glad I did.

    The story is set in the Eastern US (although you don’t learn that into well into the book, and then only by one reference to them traveling through “the Piedmont”) years after a holocaust (meteor, nuclear, a caldera–it’s not ever really confirmed) and the resulting choas that turns America in a bleak place of ash and death. A father and son travel a mostly deserted road south to warmer weather, pushing a grocery cart with their few belongings. The father’s sick; he might be dying. And if he dies, we know the boy will die too because there’s nothing to eat but tins of what they can scavenge from houses that were ransacked and abandoned years before. And because others who survived have turned to hunting and eating people.

    This is an incredible story about the relationship between this father and son and the dangers they face. McCarthy tells the story in plain detail. In fact, his understatement and attention to detail in this terrible landscape make it all the more powerful. Stechschulte’s reading is perfect.

    The film is due out in 2009 and features Viggo Mortensen. But I wouldn’t wait for the movie if I were you. I’d get the book now. Or the recording. I couldn’t put this tale down. I’m betting you won’t be able to either.

    Share

  • Indie Thoughts: The Kind of Competition Publishers Want

    ByJohn Brown

    David Gaughran puts it all into perspective.

    Since the huge shift to online purchasing and e-books, a common meme is that there is some kind of “discoverability” problem in publishing.

    The funny thing is readers don’t seem to have any problem finding books they love. Any readers I talk to have a time problem – reading lists a mile long and never enough hours in the day to read all the great books they are discovering.

    The real discoverability problem in publishing is that readers are discovering (and enjoying) books that don’t come from the large publishers. What these publishers have is a competition problem not a discoverability problem.

    They have reason to. I had a stab last year at estimating how much of the e-book market self-publishers have grabbed in the US, pegging it at around 25%. The much more rigorous Author Earnings reports have confirmed that estimate, showing that self-publishers had captured 30% of the unit sales on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

    * * * *

    So when large publishers say that the discoverability puzzle hasn’t been solved online, they are really expressing despair at retailers recommending books not published by them.

    And when large publishers say that online retailers haven’t matched the experience of buying in physical stores, they mean that they wish there was some way to relegate all that stuff from small publishers and self-publishers to the warehouse, and have tables piled high with James Patterson and Snooki.

    * * * *

    The fear-mongers always forget Amazon’s core philosophy: recommend the product the customer is most likely to purchase. It’s interesting to note that this is the exact opposite of traditional co-op: recommending the book that the publisher wants purchased.

    While it’s revealing to look at sites like Bookish and consider what Big Publishing would do with retail or discovery, we already know what it does with self-publishing. Exploitative vanity press Author Solutions runs self-publishing companies for HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Harlequin, is owned by Penguin Random House, and is now recommended by Publishers Weekly.

    Large publishers want to decide what gets published, what gets distributed, what gets recommended, what gets discovered, and what gets sold.

    Amazon – and the digital revolution it instigated – has made that impossible.

    Anyone can publish. Distribution has been blown wide open. Large publishers have lost power over what books get recommended and discovered too, with the agnostic approach of sites like Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub. And large publishers have definitely lost control of what is getting sold: self-publishers have grabbed a huge chunk of the market, and more and more writers are beginning to realize they don’t need a publisher to reach readers and make money.

    This is the real reason why Big Publishing hates Amazon. Large publishers face real competition for the first time and they don’t like it one bit.

    More at Let’s Get Visible.

    Publishers have lost the barriers to entry that used to keep most of the competition out. Amazon set up a totally new distribution channel that has grabbed at least 41% of the book market.

    Forty freaking one percent!

    And of that 41% percent, it appears self-publishers have about as much of that channel as traditional publishers do.

    Think about that for a second.

    Almost half of book distribution is now out of publisher control. With no barriers, the hordes are running in to sell their books, pushing publisher books out of the good spots. The number of competitors is growing. And the publishers can’t get Amazon to relegate the riffraff to the back rooms. Can’t get them to feature only their books.

    Worse still, it appears lots of readers don’t mind that at all.

    Share
  • |

    Writing Update: Curse, trebuchets, CONduit, book industry, & Robinson Wells

    ByJohn Brown

    As of 5 PM this last Saturday I have finished 15,000 words of the climax of Curse of a Dark God. I think I have another 10,000 to go and the book will be done. I’m so close to the end of this draft! So don’t let the progress bars fool you. The ending is coming together fabulously–lots of spectacle, big reveals, and major heroics. At least, I think so.

    While working on this, I had to spend a number of hours finding out how strong a wind must be to pick up humans and stones. I also needed to know the destructive forces of various classes of tornados and hurricanes. Why would I need to know such things? I write fantasy, for Leroy’s sake!

    (Yes, that’s good English; I’m a writer, and one of my prerogatives is to make up silly versions of common expletives using the names of friends and enemies.)

    Here’s why: I just can’t write if I don’t believe in what I’m writing. And when I’ve got monsters (skir) that can generate winds that will be used in a siege, well, I had to know the terminal velocities of what these creatures could throw, and what that might mean for fortress defense. I had to know the limitations and ramifications.

    I won’t rehearse all the fascinating details (and it WAS fascinating), but all that research did lead me to a wonderful documentary. It’s called Secrets of Lost Empires 2: Medieval Siege and was produced by Nova in 2000. You can get it on Netflix or Amazon.  In the film, fifty carpenters worked day and night to create and test what they dubbed “the fourteenth century version of the atom bomb”–the trebuchet (tre-byou-SHAY). The trebuchet as the most popular throwing machine in Europe during the middle ages. If you love the history of medieval war, you’ll love this film. You might want to add to it a reading of the excellent Ancient and Medieval Siege Weapons by Konstantin Nossov, which you can get via the inter-library loan program.

    I’ll share two cool factoids for you history fans. “Catapult” means “shield-breaker,” “cata” meaning break or penetrate and “pelta” being the name of the shield used by the Greek light infantry. The original catapults were NOT big spoons–they sped arrows and balls along a track like a crossbow. However, instead of using the spring force of a bow, they used torsion-springs, which is what you get when you twist fibers that want to be straight. In the case of catapults the fibers were ropes made out of animal sinews or hair (horse or human, a woman’s hair being considered the best) and soaked in oil. Click on the image to see a larger picture. 

    A modern example of a torsion-spring are those balsa wood airplanes with propellers attached to a rubber band that’s hooked to the belly of the plane. To fly them, you rotate the propeller round and round, twisting the rubber band. Then you let the propeller go. Because the rubber wants to be straight, it reverses the twist, spinning the propeller the opposite way you twisted it. 

    You might think these torsion-spring engines were weak. But one catapult was reported as being powerful enough that an arrow shot from it broke through a shield, and the armored warrior standing behind it, at a distance of 400 yards! Hence, the name.

    The other factoid is that “trebuchet” comes from the French term meaning to overthrow. If you saw Return of the King, you’ll recognize them as the engines used on the towers of Minas Tirith. Trebuchets are simply an evolution of the staff sling. When it came to breaking castle walls, there was nothing more effective until the cannon appeared. Of course, in my book I use them a bit differently. You’ll see.

    One funny thing. I watched the movie with my oldest who was just as fascinated with the engines as I was. When she was telling my wife about the film, she kept referring to trech-uh-butts. Which, I guess, is as fair an attempt at “trebuchet” as any. However, my wife kept picturing buttocks and couldn’t figure out what the heck my daughter was talking about–“You were watching what with your father?!”

    The French make things so hard . . .

    ***

    The Monday after CONduit I left for work in Mexico and then Vegas. I didn’t get back until this week. So I just wanted to say I had a great time at the con. Loved chatting with all the folks there.

    It was great to see the Larry Correia, Paul Genesse, Jessica Day George, Isaac Stewart (and his brother Dan), Mette Harrison, Eric James Stone, Darren Egget, Julie Frost, Sandra Tayler, LE Modesitt, Josh Perkey, Nicole (whose husband is an Orem cop and I lost his number), Daniel Who-I-Sacrificed-to-My-Editor, and the Dungeon Crawlers Radio guys.

    It was also nice to speak with Julie Wright who was one of the initial judges for the Whitney Awards. She’s always nice to chat with, but this time it was especially nice since she said reading Servant of a Dark God was like eating chocolate. I’ll take chocolate praise any day.

    I also met new author Janci Patterson who just sold a YA with a great premise. It’s called SKIP and is about a young girl whose parents are divorced. The girl has to go stay with her dad who lives in a trailer and is a bounty hunter. I’m a sucker for bounty hunter stories. Especially this one, because she goes out with him and falls in love with one of the guys her dad has to haul in. I’ve slaughtered the pitch, but I got that good old writer’s envy when she told me about it. Can’t wait to read it.

    I also got to see Barbara Hambly. I was at LTUE when she was there like 20 years ago. We loved her stuff. She suddenly dropped out of the writing scene in the early 90’s and now I know why–it appears Del Rey dropped all their midlist authors except for Anne McCaffery and someone else. Hambly was one of the causalities.

    ***

    After Hambly’s main address, I sat with a few authors and had a brief discussion about the book industry where it was suggested the industry was shrinking–fewer readers, fewer sales, doom, doom, doom. But that is exactly opposite all the data I’ve seen.

    1. Book sales have an annual average growth over the last seven years of 1.1%, adult paperbacks are growing 2.9% http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm or http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/documents/S12009Final.pdf . Now, this doesn’t show units sold. So it could be that they sold fewer units for more money per unit. Still, it shows at the very least that $$$ aren’t shrinking.
    2. The New Book Titles report here shows an increase in the number of titles: http://www.bowker.com/index.php/book-industry-statistics — 80% increase from 2002 to 2009.
    3. Reading rates are actually on the rise: http://johndbrown.com/2009/03/literary-reading-rates-on-the-rise/
    4. Finally, I contacted Bookscan for their numbers for an ALA conference I did last summer. This is just juvenile fiction, but the numbers are in units. Now, I don’t know if they added more sources to their database and so that caused a rise, but I explained to them what I was trying to do—see trends over time—and this is the data they provided. According to their numbers, more juvenile books are being sold now than in 2004. Click on the graphic below. This means we have more and more readers rising up through the ranks! One author asked how much of that was Rowling and Meyer. During that period books by those authors accounted for an average of 7-10% of all juvenile fiction. Bookscan categorizes “juvenile” as everything for kids. That means from Go, Dog Go up through what we consider Young Adult. R&M accounted for an average of 33-36% of what Bookscan categorizes as science fiction, fantasy, or magic within the juvenile mega-category. What all that means is the growth is across the whole category, not just with their books.

    So I’m very sanguine about the book industry’s prospects. Today’s youth seem to be able to play computer games AND read in great quantities.

    ***

    Finally, one last bit of news. Robinson Wells was the one of the main ones to start the Whitney Academy and the Whitney Awards. Well, he just got some fabulous news. Here’s the announcement from Publishers Marketplace: “Robison Wells’ YA debut dystopian thriller VARIANT, a modern-day LORD OF THE FLIES, set at a boarding school where not everything is as it seems and every day is a fight for survival, in a significant deal, in a three-book deal, to Erica Sussman at Harper Children’s.”

    For those of you who don’t know, here are the PM deal categories.

    • “nice deal” $1 – $49,000
    • “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000
    • “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000
    • “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000
    • “major deal” $500,000 and up

    Oh, baby. Someday. Someday. Of course, I’m nothing but happy for Mr. Wells!

    Links

    Share

One Comment

Comments are closed.