Your business

Subscribe to RSS - Your business

"I’m never sure if it’s OK to 'just say no' to an editor’s edits," a questioner begins on The Open Notebook, partly funded by an NASW Idea Grant. Four writers and editors respond with a "maybe." An editor: "I hope that the writer will appreciate that I’ve spent many hours working out how best to edit a story, and that edits are made for a reason: to make something clearer, more logical, more suitable for our audience, or to fit on on page."

NASW's Kayt Sukel certainly created a buzz when promoting her book "Dirty Minds." Sukel, Rebecca Skloot, and four other authors are interviewed about the increasingly aggressive world of book publicity by Maggie Galehouse on the Houston Chronicle's Bookish blog. "Publishers expect authors to create Facebook pages for their books and maintain author websites," Galehouse writes. "Tweeting has also become a powerful publicity tool."

Is Amazon's rising power a threat to authors? This post from the Authors Guild says it is: "Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure." Don't miss the comments, where some endorse the Amazon-as-evil meme, and others blame brick-and-mortar stores: "The publishing establishment waited far too long to do anything productive to address the problems in their own business."

Dan Kennedy's memoir about raising a daughter with dwarfism got good reviews but went out-of-print in 2008, having sold a mere 1,600 copies. Two years later, after a teacher friend asked for more copies than were available, Kennedy published his own at a Harvard Square bookstore. He writes about the experience in the winter Nieman Reports. "I can't tell you exactly how much I made, but I'd say it was somewhere between $750 and $800," Kennedy writes.

"I had dreamed of being a novelist since I was a kid, and now am the astonished author of 15 books and counting," former Seattle Times reporter William Dietrich writes in the winter Nieman Reports. The transition hasn't been seamless. There was one year when Dietrich says he had no income. But the biggest challenge was learning the business: "Your mission is to become a brand, figure out how to market it, and then reapply for your job every year or two."

Traditional print publishing has always left a big gap, writes Byliner's John Tayman in the winter Nieman Reports issue: "A story that needed 10,000, 20,000 or even 30,000 words to be properly told inevitably fell into publishing's dead zone. This represented the vast wasteland of impossible-to-place stories that were longer than magazine space permitted and shorter than a book was thought to be." Tayman describes Byliner's effort to find markets for those stories.

Don’t write a pitch longer than the story you’d be assigned. Don’t pitch stories from Science, Nature, PLoS, or PNAS. Don’t start your pitch with who you are or who we know in common. Those are just three tips from a panel of editors on The Open Notebook feature, "Pitching errors: How not to pitch." From the intro: "Writing a good pitch is really tough. Writing a bad one is easy. Editors see the same mistakes over and over again, even from good writers."