Around the Word

Plotting past security: Laguardia's Terminal D may seem an unlikely locale for a literary event, but the Wall Street Journal reports that multiple authors including Magic Johnson, Madeleine Albright, and Donald Trump have contributed to the growing trend of using airport bookstores to promote their work. Many authors stop to sign books in between flights, and Hudson bookstores in Newark and Kennedy were recently treated to unscheduled signings by Ice-T and Rob Lowe. "Airport signings won't supplant traditional book tours anytime soon, but maximizing publicity opportunities, even during an author's travel layover, makes sense for publishing houses as marketing budgets shrink and traditional bookstores vanish." Just remember not to use your boarding pass as a bookmark! 

Twitter and Twellow and Tumbleweeds, oh my! You've got your book. You've got your blog. You've got your Facebook page and Twitter account. You are now fully interactive. But what happens when the messages start flying and the fans hit the fan? For those of you who need a little help managing your following and tracking your progress, check out this hilarious, knowing post from Tumblr blogger Jill Morris, How to Become a Published Author in 237 Simple Steps. Or if you'd like the abridged version, GalleyCat narrowed down those 237 suggestions to spotlight their four favorite social media managers: Listorious, Muck Rack, Twellow and Tumbleweeds.

Anglo-American rhetorical relations: A recent column by British commentator Steve Richards denouncing the current state of political oratory in the U.K. has caused a minor stir in the speechwriting community -- and met with some skepticism on this side of the pond. Upon reading a post by U.K speechwriter Max Atkinson echoing Richards' argument, Vital Speeches of the Day editor David Murray posted an open letter challenging their dour assessment of speechmaking in the digital age. "Doesn't it give you the least bit of pause (as it does me) when you see the world declining at the same rate as you?" Murray quipped. Are things as bad in the U.S.? Tell us what you think.

The price is right: With the e-book market in its early stages of development, publishers and authors are still struggling with how much to charge for digital lit. E-books are sold at a wide range of prices, from $.99 to $19. So where should an author price their e-book to get the most exposure and rake in the most royalties? You can find some useful answers in this blog post from author Bob Mayer, which aims to demystify the pricing process and help publishers and free agents alike find their sweet spot.

The Bloodsucker Proxy

Late last week we stumbled upon an old post on Copyblogger about the mortal verbal threat posed by "vampire words" -- qualifiers like "rather," "pretty," "very," and "little" that "suck the lifeforce from sentences." Once we read the author's personal list of greatest nits, we were curious to get the perspective of other writers and find out how prevalent this peeve is. So, naturally, we polled the ghosts in the network to name their vampire nemeses.

Boy did we hit a nerve -- or should we say in this case a vein. Our poll unleashed a torrent of rhetorical bane-naming: words, phrases, even a thorough debunking of Strunk and White-ing. Many responses fit the basic Copyblogger standard of bloodsucking qualifiers ("important," "generally," "often," "actually," "basically,""literally," "unique,""impactful,""iconic"). Many others took a more expansive reading of the question and pointed fickle fingers at annoying/officious constructions and noxious cliches ("that is why," "just that," "the fact that," "perfect storm," "value-added," "silver bullet," "a myriad of," "plethora," "whence").

One writer, Richard Eskow, went so far as to take a stake to adjectives en masse.

"Every adjective slows the momentum of a sentence.  And every adjective imposes the writer's biases on the reader.  Therefore, every adjective inhibits the free flow of imagination that makes reading a collaboration between writer and reader.  It stifles off one-half of the human capital available for that act by excluding the reader from the interpretive proces. But while every adjective is a vampire word, some draw far more blood than others.  The more syllables an adjective has, for example, the more vampiric it may become. . . The worst adjective of all?  Maybe 'unsurprisingly.' For one thing it has too many syllables.  For another thing, if it's not surprising why waste my time by making me read about it?

Peter Roff, on the other hand, went to the other extreme. "There are no bad words," he wrote. "There are only bad writers."

The one clear takeaway -- hackery, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Now, for your venting pleasure, is a sampling of the more revealing and creative replies we received.

"It goes without saying" (then why say it?) that I've been resisting the urge to take a "deep dive" into this topic. (How deep, and why dive?) I can't decide, is it better to take a "deep dive", "jump in with both feet" (as opposed to jumping in with one foot), or just "dip my toe into the water?"  At any rate, I'm sure this group can "get to the bottom" of it. Who knows, we might even "change the paradigm" for identifying vampire words.  Meanwhile, let's all "like...you know..."
-- Boe Workman

If I hear one more person say "at the end of the day" I think I'll throw myself off a building. . . but not until the day is over.
-- Jacqueline Gold

I've found that even though I might not object to something on my own, finding out that another editor does, particularly for a clever reason, has swayed me over. For example, some years ago I heard that the editor of the Journal at one point announced that if he saw the word "upcoming" in a story again, he would be "downcoming" and the reporter would be "outgoing."  I had never really thought about it before but was convinced from that day forth.
-- Steve Hirsch

Too many otherwise good writers use "palpable." To me, it is similar to saying something is obvious or noticeable. If it wasn't either of those, you wouldn't be able to write about it.
-- Zachary Janowski

Have your own pet peeve to share? Feel free to write in your nominations in the comments below.

Full Ghostwriting Workshop Video Now Available

If you missed the workshop we recently co-hosted with ASJA on how to break into ghostwriting, the full video is now available online for download to watch at your convenience. Just go to the ASJA recordings page and follow the instructions for downloading in either WMV or MP4 formats.

P.S. Since we got such a positive response to this event, we are working on developing a follow-up workshop for ghostwriters of all experience levels in the next several weeks. Stay tuned for more details.

Around the Word

Commencement 2011. . . The good, the bad, and the lengthy. Our friend Fletcher Dean, one of the top speechwriting pros around, deploys his fine-tuned ear to flag the best and worst of this graduation season's speeches -- and what professional communicators can learn from them. Some speakers -- like Denzel Washington and broadcast journalist Robert Krulwich -- soared and scored by engaging their audiences and keeping their anecdotes snappy. Less impressive were Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and New York Academy of Medicine President Jo Ivey Boufford, who spent large chunks of time fixating on policy instead of giving concise, relevant advice to grads.

For more Commencement 2011 highlights, check out the Huffington Post's video slideshow of some of the most high-profile speakers for this season. From Amy Poehler's hilarious Harvard routine to Michelle Obama's speech at Spelman to Tom Hanks at Yale, you can get some instant grad-ification and experience the best of class among 2011 speakers. Have your own favorites to share? Post a note in the comments below or email us at: info@gothamghostwriters.com.

The book club goes global: Next time you're reading and have an OMG-moment, try turning to Twitter -- chances are there are other bookworms in the Twitterverse discussing the exact same title. In fact, publishers are beginning to take advantage of this insta-community by attaching a hashtag to printed books in order to facilitate an ongoing digital discussion. The ladies at Women on Writing are among the leading evangelists for the concept, since it enables readers to connect with a much broader universe of like-minded literary lovers. Though book hashtags still have some kinks (what to do about spoilers?) it's definitely another way to bring traditional print into the digital age #thefutureishere.

Highlights of the Kardashian Name Game

Thanks to all our friends who sent us their entries for the Kardashian Name Game, our mock version of the contest that the Special K sisters are running to title their soon-to-be released novel. As promised, here is a list of our favorite submissions (most of which were submitted anonymously), with the gold(digger) medal winner at the bottom.

Tweet, Play, Loaf
-- Mike Spoodis

For Whom the Cellphone Texts
-- Tom Teichoz

Three Babies and No Men
-- Jeff Kreisler

Nothing Butt Love
-- Anonymous

Remembrance of Thongs Past
-- Anonymous

Are You There Camera? It's Me Kardashian
-- Anonymous

Lay It As It Plays: Or How To Bed An Athlete (power forward by Lamar Odom)
-- Anonymous

Naked Lunch, Breakfast, and Dinner
-- Anonymous

Lack of Atonement
-- Anonymous

A Green Room of One's Own
 -- Anonymous

And the gold(digger) medal goes to. . . .

To Shill A Mockingbird
-- Anoynmous

P.S. To update you on the real contest, Harper Collins has selected five finalists and is asking fans to choose the winner from among them. Alas, none of our submissions made the cut. But if you're still interested, you can vote here.

Ghosts in the Celebrity Machine

By Dan Gerstein

Last week we had some pun fun with the contest the Kardashian sisters were running on Twitter to name their soon-to-be published novel (we'll post some of our favorite submissions soon, FYI). But as the New York Times points out today, celebrity chick lit is fast becoming serious business. To wit (and we're using that phrase loosely): Nicole Richie, Hilary Duff, Lauren Conrad have all joined the Kardashians in scoring big bucks book deals relatively recently, while Snooki had her fiction debut (A Shore Thing) land on the Times best-seller list at the beginning of the year.

This trend raises a seemingly juicy question that the Times dutifully uses as a hook for its story: did these starlets actually write these books themselves? The authors and their publicists adhere to their reality TV training and try to maintain the fiction that their fiction is their own -- when the question was put to Snooki on the Today Show, she replied, “I did. . . . Because if you read it, you’ll know the first page that I wrote it. Cause, like, it’s all my language.” But the Times reporter rather effortlessly confirms that they've all used ghostwriters; Richie's publisher contradicted her claims of authorship in the bat of an eyelash extension.

Reading this, I could not help but have a Claude Rains in "Casablanca" moment. We're supposed to be shocked, shocked that there is ghostwriting in Hollywood. That women who are paid to look good reading other people's writing on camera might get paid for using other people's writing in print. That a self-appelled "Guidette" who admits to having read two books in her life might have had some help writing a 304-page novel. Seriously, the news here would have been if any of these actresses and/or professional publicity chasers had written the book without the aid of a ghost.

What the article did expose, though, was an implicit prejudice/disdain for ghostwriting that remains all too common among journalistic and writing elites. Most average Americans understand and accept that politicians work with speechwriters, late night talk show hosts use jokewriters, CEOs hire professional business writers to help craft their leadership tomes. And yet when it comes to the Kardashian sorority producing a novel for a major publisher, perhaps the most obvious case of literary assistance imaginable, the Times felt compelled to search for a non-existent ethical issue. What's next: an investigation into the veracity of professional wrestling?

Now we suspect that Times' overreaction is due in some part to the apparent novelty of ghostwritten novels, that such a personal form of individual imaginate could be subbed out mostly or wholely to another writer. But the fact is even top fiction writers like James Patterson and James Frey have been employing small armies of ghosts to support their prolific output. And we can attest from our recent experience, with dozens of non-writers calling us for help in turning their inspiration into a novel, that this practice is only going to become more and more common-place as the barriers to entry for publishing a book disintegrate.

That's a subject for a longer dedicated meditation. For now, we would suggest that if the Times is looking for a scandal here, it should seek out and talk to all the promising young writers who are being Snooki-ed out of publishing deals.

Gerstein is president of Gotham Ghostwriters

Around the Word

The grad-daddy of all commencement gifts: New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan confesses to an unusual side gig -- he's a graduation speech groupie. He finds the field so inspiring, in fact, that he was moved to pen a book that tries to capture the best advice he's heard -- Everything is Going to Be Okay: A Book for You or Someone Like You. Our friend the Eloquent Woman, who is no pushover, gives it two tassels up today, calling it "a book that will delight anyone who's had to give a speech" as well as recent grads. To read more about Kaplan's ode to pomp and circumstance -- and to see a slideshow of illustrations from the book -- check out Kaplan's article in the Huffington Post.

Social studies for authors: As many of our writers can attest, authors are under growing pressure these days to master or at least muster social media to promote and market their work, and that can be quite a problem if not downright intimidating for the techno-challenged among us. To help out these digital newbies, editor and blogger Meghan Ward has compiled a list of the best social media books for authors. Add these volumes to your personal library and you'll be blogging, tweeting and Facebook-ing like a pro in no time.

Loving your inner luddite: For those writers who proudly embrace their inner analog, and want to rage against the digitizing of the light, you may want to join Garth Risk Hallberg's anti-Kindle crusade. He's mastered the art of making your book unpublishable on the Amazon reader, and is freely sharing his secrets for e-voidance. The black-and-white Kindle can't handle inventive typefaces or color illustrations, Hallberg points out, so if you want to make sure your book stays in pristine, printed form, pile on the experimental formatting. Other suggestions? Make your book a boxed set, encourage your readers to interact with the book (for example, by taking scissors to it) and add tons of end-notes.

Calling all literary cool kids: Here's a new website to watch, especially for our younger friends in the publishing biz. Publishing Trendsetter "is where young book professionals can gather guidance and share knowledge and ideas" as well as "a place for industry veterans to engage with the most creative and gifted up-and-comers." This collaboration between Publishing Trends and Market Partners International has a host of talented up-and-coming bloggers on staff and we're looking forward to seeing what these publishing pups come up with.