I spent the first 30 years of my adult life as a consultant in the world of energy and the environment. I’ve done energy and solid waste audits of over 600 institutional and corporate buildings throughout the United States. During that time I wrote eleven separate manuals on energy conservation and recycling.
I was pretty good at what I Continue reading
The Apple vs. Department of Justice anti-trust, book pricing case came to an end this past week. It offered a rare and important glimpse of the private nether regions of both the publishing world and the new corporate media industry controlled in large part by Apple and Amazon.
I co-authored an op-ed piece on this case at Talking Writing magazine with TW’s editor in chief, Martha Nichols. It’s called “Thank You, Apple, for Going to Court Over E-Books.” Unlike most of the pundits in the publishing and high-tech worlds, Martha and I took the long-term perspective of authors — not corporate publishers and consumers. Apple and the big publishers were trying to change the business model of retail book sales. Rather than allow retailers control of pricing, Apple and the Continue reading
I just found a short Huffington Post ditty attached to a video rant by media phenom John Green sort of seeming to trash the idea of self-publishing and going it alone as an author. The link to it is: John Green on Self Publishing.
Green makes some good points, but he’s also sort of fizzling out of both assholes at once. On the one hand, he’s pushing back on those who have been using him as an example of an author who can “flip the paradigm” because he’s got such major social media cred and a pot full of fans and readers, and shouldn’t need the support of publishers.
On the other hand he is presenting thoroughly drenching sputum (watch him) that has insulted a number of indie authors I am in contact with throughout the Universe.
But what he makes me think about (I’ve watched the video 3 times now) is how lonely it is Continue reading
I’ve spent the spring adapting stories I began writing almost a decade ago into a novel. The stories all had to do somehow with a character I called Julia Davenport. It’s been quite an interesting task converting short stories into long prose. Six tales were completed by 2005, and another four or five fitful starts came after that. I figured I could finish these starts over the spring and then turn it all into a book that would effectively amount to a series of vignettes about life here in the early part of this new century.
Julia was the connecting piece through all of the stories I wrote. However, each piece was composed in a different voice with a somewhat unique narrator and a weird perspective on life and love. In many ways, although I wasn’t overtly aware of it at the time, this approach to creating fiction is now a common methodology for contemporary storytellers.
Point of view is a key element in all storytelling. The standard way of doing things is Continue reading
Reviewer: Barry Purcell
This book is nine short stories full of desperate, confused middle-aged men who want to have sex with younger women, who miss the thrill of new love, and who suspect something is deeply wrong with their essentially uneventful lives. Nine thoughtful stories revolve around the broad theme of mature love and if you’ve ever loved anyone, and then loved someone else, you’ll identify with most of the narratives.
In each story, there is a man called Wendell. He’s a different person each time, but he represents the same thing: what we might consider the “straight man”, the guy to whom things happen, and who is the “normal” one by the standards of the story. In each Continue reading
It took me at least a year of college to learn to live with my Midwestern sincerity. I went to a school on the West Coast full of super smart people. That was bad enough — being kind of average intelligence on a campus full of freaking geniuses. But on top of that a lot of my peers were from LA, The Bay Area, NYC and the Boston area. Each of those regions has its own version of cynical irony through which to approach life. I hadn’t learned cynical irony yet.
To say the least, then, I was a fish out of water in my freshman year. It was a hard year. A good high school friend committed suicide two weeks after I last saw him during Christmas break. My girl friend broke up with me because she was having a hard time with the concept of a long distance relationship. And I really felt out-gunned in class Continue reading
The share of the book market attributable to self-published books is not an easy number to track down. But a lot of folks with skin in the game feel data like this is pretty important now that the indie publishing movement has a few years under its belt. However, if you pay attention to all the bloggers on this subject, its kind of comical how they stretch the math given the paucity of meaningful and transparent numbers.
Market share questions for both indie work and electronic books may in fact be a major red herring that will fade away in the next few years for most of us as writers continue to enhance their creative offerings. Here at the dawn of the economy of the Continue reading
My most recent “Talking Indies” column is about independent bookstores and whether their interests mesh with promoting indie authors. The piece is called “Why Bookstores Aren’t Helping Indie Authors—Yet.” You can read it in the Spring Edition of Talking Writing (find the column link at the end of this entry).
I wanted to post an addendum to my column here because a number of indie authors I heard from after the piece was published have gone on record saying they really don’t care about their book being shelved in bookstores. The basic argument is the rather facile one I began my first draft with: “Why put effort into interacting with small businesses that may see a few score of customers a day when posting to Internet books sites provides you with an entre to billions of potential readers?”
The obvious answer, since most writers have limited time to market and sell their work, is “Yes, why?”
If you think short-term, that’s probably a good answer. But bookstores really are, as Continue reading
When someone speaks knowingly of a heart of darkness somewhere, understand that they don’t realize this heart is only an opening or an entrance into something that is hard to understand. Inside a real heart of darkness there are dimensions. We’re not just talking about a black smudge of mystery signifying the beginning of a cave. What is inside that cave matters far more than some mystical representation Continue reading