Roy Peter Clark once pitched a book proposal called The Honest Writer, in which he owned up to some of his own youthful sins against journalism, including fabricating quotes for a high school term paper. He reveals more in a Poynter post: "For the writer, in school or on the job, honesty is not just the best policy; it’s also the best insurance policy, protecting you and your reader from every form of literary malpractice. Honesty will keep you out of trouble."
Science writing news
Do you despair of your book ever reaching the top of one of the broadest Amazon sales categories? Lindsay Buroker writes that the secret is to aim for a niche category. It might take a sales ranking of 1,000 to reach the top 20 of a popular category, but only 3,000 for a narrower, more specialized one, and Buroker explains how to get there: "Getting a sub-10,000 sales ranking is still pretty challenging, especially for a debut author, but it's a little more doable."
Writing in AJR, Jim Bach explains how much reporter pay has slipped since 2003: "A decade ago, reporters and correspondents earned more than the average wage for all U.S. workers, but that is no longer true. Reporters, on average, earned $2,080 less than the national average last May, the most recent month for which data is available." Also, from Vox, we should have become anesthesiologists, but at least we're better than fast food cooks.
Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker wrote Going Clear, a biography of L. Ron Hubbard. Michelle V. Rafter mines Wright's book for a half-dozen tips on writing longform, including the importance of going slow: "Take your time. The news business places a lot of emphasis on being first with a story. While there's definitely a market for that, there's also a market for a tale that goes into the nuances of a subject, which takes time to report, and time to tell."
Helen Sedwick lists seven questions that potential self-publishing authors should ask when evaluating offers from a self-publishing service company (SPSC). For example, she writes, how much will you be paying for copies you buy yourself to give away or for resale? "The author price should be the actual printing costs plus a reasonable markup (15-20%) and not a discount from the retail price. Why pay more because the SPSC sets the retail price at $20 instead of $10?"
The Dutch financial institution ING surveyed journalists and public relations professionals to produce some surprising conclusions about fact-checking in the age of social media. "Fact-checking has become less thorough. 'Publish first, correct if necessary' is the motto these days. Only 20% of journalists always check their facts before publishing. Almost half of journalists said they published most of their stories as quickly as possible to correct later if necessary."
Should experts charge a fee for mentoring beginners? Anna North finds some in writing and other fields who are doing exactly that: "Charging for what might once have been informal counsel is becoming more common — and the growing freelance economy may be behind the shift," North writes. "While those who work in offices may be able to buttonhole their colleagues with questions, people working for themselves may have to seek out friends or acquaintances for help."
The songwriter talks about creativity on Brain Pickings: "I have found that the key to not being blocked is to not worry about it. Ever. If you are sitting down and you feel that you want to write and nothing is coming, you get up and do something else. Then you come back again and try it again. But you do it in a relaxed manner. Trust that it will be there … It always comes back and the only thing that is a problem is when you get in your own way worrying about it."
The labs that study lethal organisms may be a greater threat to public safety than the actions of bioterrorists, Tabitha M. Powledge writes in her weekly roundup: "The data argue that we are in far more danger from accidents emanating from well-meant research efforts to protect ourselves. To date there have been no bioterrorists." Also, a milestone for the "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" paper, and how to interpret some new findings on triglycerides.