The (Publishing) Empire Strikes Back

The latest sign of just how dramatically the publishing industry is e-volving came late last week with the unveiling of Bookish.com, the online literary clearinghouse that three of the largest American trade publishers will be launching in July to directly challenge the digital hegemony of Amazon and iTunes.

The goal of the new venture, hatched by Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, is to leverage the publishers' comparative advantage of inside insight and to position Bookish as "one-stop shopping for consumers to find everything they want to know about books in one place,"according to S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy. In practice, that means the site will aggregate the various publisher-produced marketing and supplementary materials, feature reader reviews, and advise bookfiends where to get their hands on copies of the latest titles -- both by recommending local bookstores and by offering books for sale direct from the site.


We will be watching this experiment closely, especially for its impact on authors. It's hard to say at this point just what that will be -- details about how Bookish will work are still fuzzy, and all the early focus has been on consumers. But it seems to hold some promise as a platform for writers to reach out to new readers and broaden their audience. Not only will the site host each book's promotional materials, it will also link books together via the recommendation engine -- one more way for your would-be audience to stumble upon your work.

Are we being overly bullish on Bookish? We'd love to hear your take.

Around the World

The media's self-publishing crush grows: The latest major mainstream media outlet to discover the self-publishing revolution is the Washington Post. Over the weekend the paper showed some big love to the growing number of romance novelists and other unknown writers gone rogue who are making a killing selling online at rock-bottom prices. The Post feature focused on the success story of romance writer Nyree Belleville, who made more than $19,000 in one month from her online sales. Any writers flying solo out there who have found similar paydirt? We want to hear your stories.

Hear ye query: An author's life is full of rejection, but when you know your manuscript is good, that rejection can feel more like a bad break-up than a failed pick-up line. To help writers avoid that sting, agent/blogger Sarah LaPolla gives tips on applying "band-aids" to a strong story that has failed to capture an agent's attention. For starters: avoid redundancy, don't have characters say what they're thinking, and "Pass Writing 101."

From keyboard jockey to junkie: Facebook is one of our favorite ways to procrastinate, and we know it's a weakness for other writers too. Though it is useful in many ways for promoting your work and connecting with others (the new Journalists on Facebook function is pretty neat) sometimes surfing The Book can turn into a full-fledged addiction. To find out if you're veering into junkie territory, check out this Social Times article on Facebook Addiction Disorder and see if you have some of the symptoms.

There's a scrap for that: Speaking of Facebook, Simon and Schuster is debuting an eye-catching new app for the site called Book Battle, which the New York Times describes as "a literary version of hotornot.com." The application matches up two books and users choose their favorite cover, author and characters. So far, it focuses mostly on young adult novels, but we'd love to see some other works go head-to-head, too. How about Sherlock Holmes vs. Miss Marple? The DaVinci Code vs. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Greg Mortenson vs. James Frey?

More e-news you can use: Here's some interesting new digital data points to shed some light on e-reading habits. First, new research shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, few iPad owners are using their device to read books. Substantially more e-books are being bought for the Kindle, Nook, Sony devices and other e-readers than for Apple's new iT toy. The one exception: kid consumers. USA Today reports today that children's books are the top-selling book apps at the iTunes store.

Around the Word

The last word in gifts for Mom: If you're still looking for a present for your book-loving mother, Galley Cat has made things easy for you by compiling a variety of Top 10 Lists of Literary Gifts for Mother's Day. Our favorite: the "Top 10 Books To Make Mom Cry -- In a Good Way." Cards and iPad batteries not included.

Maybe the kids are not alright: Examining gender bias in literature is usually the province of upper-level college English courses. But in today's New York Times we learn the issue can also be child's play -- a staple in children's books, in fact, for the past century. Drawing from a new study in the April issue of "Gender and Society," the Times reports that, in a study of 6,000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000, 57 percent had male lead characters and only 31 percent had female. According to the researchers, these imbalanced representations, especially with respect to animal protagonists, "suggest that these characters could be particularly powerful, and potentially overlooked, conduits for gender messages."

Introducing the cook club: Do the serious discussions in your book club ever leave you wishing you could trade pondering plots for provolone and prosciutto? Well, you might be in (pot)luck. The San Jose Mercury News reports that culinary book clubs are springing up across the country, often sponsored by bookstores or foodie boutiques. While members congregate to dish on mouth-watering memoirs, they rarely discuss straight cookbooks, which sets these clubs apart from other cooking related groups. So if the idea of Alice Medrich passing around hot cookies from her book, "Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Melt-in-your-Mouth Cookies" sounds appetizing, get reading.

A speech barometer?: Objectively measuring the effectiveness of your speech might sound like a lost cause (unless you have your own dial testing equipment). But communications guru Angela Sinikas has come up with some convincing ways to see quantitatively how speakers actually register with their audiences. There are three key outcomes she suggests focusing on: finding the extent to which the speech increases knowledge, creates more favorable attitudes, and changes the audiences decisions and behaviors. Obviously to measure these impacts you need to have an idea of the baseline, so Sinicom provides some innovative ideas on how to set up your speech metrics as well.

Twin speaks: Certain grammatical nuances can allude even the most seasoned writers. . . . wait, I'm pretty sure we mean elude. . . . and if you can relate to our moment of confusion then you might want to check out Ragan's take on "terrible twins." Sifting through troves of mis-used words compiled from a variety of grammar sites, Ragan has compiled a great cheat sheet explaining the differences between a host of homonymns -- such as founder and flounder, bated and baited, and, of course, allude and elude.

Around the Word

Signed, SEAL-ed, already delivered: Though the killing of Osama bin Laden is bound to be an event that launched a thousand book deals (security expert Peter Bergen just scored one), a new memoir coming out this month can already give us some insight into the elite force that completed the mission. SEAL Team Six is the memoir of Howard E. Wasdin, a former member of the elite counter-terrorism strike force responsible for finding and killing bin Laden. Like a successful operation, the launch of this book has managed to combine thorough research with precise timing. We bet Wasdin and his publisher are even more thankful than the rest of us for Sunday's turn of events.


Self-help for self-promotion: The comments section on most online hubs can be dodgy places, containing a lot more missives than hits. But every once in a while you can find some real diamonds in the rhetorical rough. Case in point: Galleycat stumbled upon a rather enlightening thread on the Amazon discussion boards this week of authors sharing lessons learned from their experiences self-promoting their works. The editors at GC culled the best tips into a Top 10 list of untraditional ways to get your book noticed. The be-all-end-all of the list (literally and figuratively): Paid advertising with Armegeddon Books

E-lancing made E-Z: As many of our writers can attest, the Web has quickly become a treasure trove of freelance writing opportunities, with dozens of sites posting job openings and new projects. But navigating the multitude of sites has turned into a challenge in its own right. How's a working writer to separate the wheat from the trash? Well, Mashable has come to the rescue, compiling a list of the top five online communities for freelancers. Have you ever used Elance, Sologig or any of the other top five freelancer social networks before? If so, we'd love to hear what you think.

Say hello to the "questolon": In our constantly evolving language of emoticons, LOLs and bloggable memes, surely there's room for a new punctuation mark. Katrina Olsen makes the case for the "questolon," a mark combining a question mark and a semicolon that signifies the pause between a question and a related statement. Olsen jokingly advocates for the establishment of the Questolon Establishment Support Team, asking "Will you join me(questolon) I hope you will!"

As Monty Python said. . . .: In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard professor and librarian Robert Darnton has an interesting piece deconstructing five prevailing information myths of our time. Not surprisingly, his biggest beef is with the presumed obsolescence of the physical book and its primary residence, which he argues are far from dead. Though the wealth of digital information is certainly expanding rapidly, Darnton believes that old and new technologies can and will still exist side-by-side. "Old books and e-books should be thought of as allies, not enemies," he says.

Announcing Our First Free Workshop

With all the turns and churns going on these days in the content business, and all the journalists now seeking new ways to get paid, interest in the specialty field of ghostwriting has been rapidly rising. But outside of the recent Roman Polanski film, most of the writers we hear from who are looking to diversify know relatively little about how this traditionally opaque sector works -- in particular, how to get started in it and how to succeed at it.

To help provide some clarity to the curious, and give working writers a better sense of whether ghosting is for them, our firm is teaming up with the American Society of Journalists and Authors to host a free introductory workshop with a panel of experts on May 24. Among the topics the discussion will cover: the state of today's ghostwriting market, the mechanics of ghostwriting a book, marketing your services, building and maintaining a client base, and contract and payment issues.

Leading the conversation will be:

• Dan Gerstein, President of Gotham Ghostwriters

• Ellen Neuborne, former USA Today reporter, ghostwriter of more than a dozen book projects, and creator of the online course "The Writer's Guide to Ghosting

• Jason Ashlock, founder of the Moveable Type Literary Group

WHEN:
May 24, 6-7:30 p.m.

WHERE:  
NYU's Carter Journalism Institute
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor
(at East 5th Street)

Around the Word

Go the — to the bank: Our favorite story from over the weekend was the New York Times' account of author Adam Mansbach's Facebook joke turned bestseller, Go the — to Sleep. Mansbach was just trying to blow off a little steam about his daughter's refusal to hit the hay when he posted a note on his FB wall to look out for his next book with that immortal/immoral exhortation. But Daddy Dirtiest was so overwhelmed by the response, he decided to tun his rant into a collection of rhymes. Now, thanks to digital word of (potty) mouth, Hansbach's book is climbing the Amazon bestseller list on the strength of pre-orders alone. 

I'll tweet when I'm dead: Not to be outdone by Fake Steve Jobs or the Bronx Zoo Cobra, more than a few famous deceased authors are turning up on Twitter to offer their bite-sized words of posthumous wisdom. The Atlantic has done us the favor of compiling a best of the dead list. We were particularly taken with this tart tweet from Edith Wharton: "Thoughts on this return: travel has improved. New York has not. #talkingdead."

The oldest sales trick in the book: While self-promotion may sometimes seem like a unique burden for authors in the digital age to deal with, writer Tony Perrottet assures us that it's nothing new. Writing in this past weekend's Times Book Review, Perrottet recounts that Hemmingway posed for beer ads, Virginia Woolfe went shopping with British Vogue and Walt Whitman wrote his own anonymous reviews -- all to promote their own work. When put in historical perspective, Tweeting doesn't look so bad after all.

Books love LA: In case you missed it, the L.A. Times Book Festival was held this weekend at USC. To get a re-cap of all the major (and merely curious) happenings from the two days of panels and presentations by authors, check out the coverage today on the Times' Jacket Copy blog.

From Insider Humor to Human History: Obama's Last 24 Hours

By Cynthia Starks

Saturday night President Obama had a lot of fun with his humorous remarks at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. Then, on a quiet Sunday, history arrived. The killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. troops at a compound in Pakistan stunned and surprised us, and called forth both strong and heartfelt remarks by our President. The New York Times reports he wrote the speech himself.

He did a beautiful job. He began in a straightforward manner: “Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden…”

Next, he drew a picture of the dark day for which bin Laden was responsible: “It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history.”

Then, in elegiac prose, the President recalled the lingering pain of the deaths on that day, “the empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us.”

He thanked the military: “Over the past 10 years, thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort” -- referring to the war against Al Qaeda to “protect our citizens, our friends, and our allies.”

And throughout his remarks, Obama wove in the “American Story” -- who we are as a people, what we stand for. He said, “In our time of grief, the American people came together. We offered our neighbors a hand, and we offered the wounded our blood. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. On that day, no matter where we came from, what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.”

He continued, “The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.” And later, “Americans understand the cost of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and our allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are…”

Near the conclusion of his remarks, he said, “Today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. Tonight we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history…”

Finally, “Let us remember that we can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

A beautiful, beautiful speech. At its heart, it told a story. Not just the story of the killing of Osama bin Laden, but our story -- the story of the American people. We are a peaceful people. We suffered a vicious, unprovoked attack. Because we are a good and great nation, committed to justice and protecting our people, we pursued Osama bin Laden. Even though it took 10 years, we did not give up. This is who we are. We can do anything we set our minds to do. And we are this way because we are one nation, indivisible, under God, with liberty and justice for all.

Speechwriters may live for events like the White House Correspondents Dinner remarks -- where they can let their hair down, and write funny stories and anecdotes based on popular culture, current news and newsmakers.

But on a more regular basis, speechwriters also live to tell stories like this one -- not specifically about Osama bin Laden’s death, of course -- but stories that should be at the heart of every speech. Why we do what we do. Why we care. Who benefits. Why it uplifts us and calls upon the “better angels” of our nature.

A speaker’s audience, no matter who it is -- employees, customers, industry peers -- wants to be reminded that they can make a difference in the world. That they are part of something larger than themselves. It is the speaker’s job -- and the speechwriter’s -- to articulate this through the stories they tell. 

Starks is a freelance speechwriter based in Indiana