Dump The Advance, Watch Authors Everywhere Go Catatonic

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We always appreciate it when someone comes out swinging, ready to fight the traditional publishing model. Lynne Scanlon, contrarian and cranky, has decided to enter the fray with a radical suggestion: dump the advance/royalty model in favor of cash-in-hand. As she rightly points out, contracts don’t favor the author (rule of thumb: the contract always favors the party who writes it): What’s an advance against royalties, really? It’s a loan. Something you have to pay back before you see a dime more. Yes, there is the possibility that enough copies will be sold at high enough prices and you’ll receive […]

The Business of Publishing

Morning Fix: Copyright Law

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We know how hard it is to get worked up about copyright. All those funny ©’s and time frames and what is fair use, anyway? So it’s always nice to have a copyright primer handy. Plus they make great party favors! Bloggers and copyright mavens alike can always use a refresher on truths and myths. One we see quite often is full reproduction of an article from another source. These are generally attributed, but posted with the clear intent of keeping you, the reader, from going to the source. That, for what it’s worth, is bad. To quote Brad Thompson:

Our Continuing Fascination With Copyright

The Tale Of The Cranky Agent, Or How You Can Avoid Mistakes

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Once upon a time, Betsy Amster was an editor. Then one day, she looked around her office and thought, “Wait! I can be an agent. The hours will be shorter, the pay better, and no marketing meetings.” So she cleared out her desk and hung out a shingle. At least some of the preceding is at least a little bit untrue. We are not sure that people actually hang shingles in this day and age. But it’s the former editor part that makes a difference: Before opening her own agency in 1992, Amster worked on the editorial side. She spent

Agents

On Defining Words

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what is plagiarism? The least sincere form? A genuine crime? Or merely the work of someone with less-than-complete mastery of quotation marks who is in too great a hurry to come up with words and ideas of his own? Plagiary, It’s Crawling All Over Me

Quote of the Week

The Ick Factor

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Sometimes it’s hard to tell: is Susan Gable sadistic or masochistic? Or maybe she has too much time on her hands. Today’s tip certainly suggests the latter. It is rare that an advertising campaign affects us in a way that inspires utter loathing. Truly. We save such emotion for truly awful thin–wait, that’s what happened here. Let us summarize to save you the agony. Oral-B, a toothbrush company, decided to promote a new, uh, sensitive brush product by tying it to romance novels. First (and this should say it all), you choose one of three readers to, we suppose, read

Square Pegs

Podcasting For Authors

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The husband has embraced audiobooks with an unexpected fervor — it turns out that T.C. Boyle short stories are just the right length for his cardio workout. Also just weird enough for his cardio workout, but that might be more than you need to know. He’s also been quite enthusiastic about the notion of podcasting novels. Or rather, reaping the benefits of someone else’s decision to podcast their work. In an effort to rouse the official BS enthusiasm, he’s taken to sending us frequent updates. In today’s installment, Cory Doctorow finishes Jame’s Patrick Kelly’s Burn. We, of course, are easily

Marketing For Introverts

Breathing A Sigh Of Relief

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Forget all that nonsense about the world ending, we were indulging in a melodramatic moment. All is right again, and we have been given a heads’ up of the best kind — coming to a bookstore near you this summer (meaning camp out now!) will be a definitive biography of one Nelle Harper Lee (we told you were were obsessed this week!). The nice people at Kirkus have a write-up of the book and a short interview with the author. No, not that author, Charles Shields, the author of the biography, Mockingbird. Really, where is your mind?. We feel like

Books/Mags/Blogs

It’s The End of the World, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

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That thud you just heard was our head hitting a wooden desk. Hard. And, yes, it hurt. We’ve long suspected that the world as we know is coming to an end. We simply didn’t realize it would happen this week. And here we went and wasted the weekend on accomplishments. Nothing less than the future of Western literature is at stake in the High Court tomorrow [today, actually]. Or so the publisher of The Da Vinci Code, the money-spinning blockbuster by Dan Brown, is expected to argue in a ground-breaking trial. Yes, kids, coming to a scandal near you: the

Square Pegs

Commercial Break: Enlightening The Media

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We realize that most of our readers aren’t lucky enough to hear the behind-the-scenes conversations (nor the re-enactments) at BS HQ, so it’s possible that you missed some ranting and raving in the last week or so. It all started, more or less, with this: Take Gallup’s poll. Beyond flat to declining blog traffic, it found just 9% of Internet users read blogs frequently, 11% do so occasionally, 13% rarely bother, and 66% never do. And “reading blogs” ranked last in a list of 13 common Internet activities, below things like emailing, checking news and weather, and shopping. It continued,

Square Pegs
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