‘Book bomb’ for Ben Wolverton – spread the word!

Amplifying the signal. Go, and do likewise. Dave Wolverton (a.k.a. David Farland), a fine writer and superb writing teacher, is in trouble, and his family needs your help:

As many of you know, Dave’s son, Ben, was in a serious long-boarding accident last week. He is 16 and suffers from severe brain trauma, a cracked skull, broken pelvis and tail bone, burnt knees, bruised lungs, broken ear drum, road rash, and is currently in a coma. His family has no insurance.

We are having a book bomb this Wednesday on behalf of Ben Wolverton to help his family out. You can view the event’s facebook page here.

For those that don’t know, a book bomb is an event where participants purchase a book on a specific day to support the author, or, in this case, a young person in serious need: Ben Wolverton.

Many of you have expressed sympathy for Dave and Ben and have asked if you could help. Now you can. We need you to help Ben get the most out of this book bomb. Right now we are focused on spreading the word and telling others about it. If you could share this event on facebook, twitter, pinterest, your blog, or through email, please do. This is a way everyone reading this can help, whatever their financial situation.

On Wednesday, we will have the book bomb. If you haven’t yet purchased Nightingale or Million Dollar Outlines, please consider doing so on Wednesday. If you have already purchased them, you can donate money to Ben and his family here.

If you have a blog and would like to do a post about this book bomb, please email me at [email protected], and I will send you some information you can use.

Please consider “attending” our event on facebook.

Thank you.

Much of the material in Million Dollar Outlines was covered in the workshop I took with Mr. Wolverton in 2011. I can vouch for its value. However, I haven’t bought the actual book. It looks like I’ll be doing that on Wednesday.

Defining ‘literary fiction’

Geoff Burling says, in a comment on The Passive Voice (same article as the last):

One problem I have with Friedman’s post was that she insisted on an artificial distinction between “literary fiction” — I’m guessing she means fiction that is written well but is not bestseller material — & “genre” fiction (e.g., romance, mystery, action, science fiction): until a few decades ago, any fiction writer published with the hope her/his book would get on the bestseller lists, that everyone would want to read the book. (I bet even Herman Melville wanted Moby Dick to be a best seller, & was disappointed when it sold poorly.) A work is classed as literature long after the author is dead in most cases, anyway.

I reply:

Actually, the ‘literary fiction’ racket has been going for over a century, and it is, indeed, a racket. It is based not on quality of writing (though, to keep its rights to the moniker ‘literary’, it does tend to insist obsessively on fine details of prose technique at the sentence level), but on exclusion. [Read more…]

Panning for mica

J. A. Konrath wrote an ebook called The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, chock-full of good advice when written; but alas, it is two years old now, and a geological era out of date. I don’t want to make a bad example of Mr. Konrath, who has done a beautiful job of keeping up with the times; his blog remains a valuable source of information and insight. But I want to quote this from the Newbie’s Guide, because it contains an important truth about the traditional publishing business, and a cardinal fallacy about salable fiction:

Consider the agent, going through 300 manuscripts in the slush pile that have accumulated over the last month.

She’s not looking to help writers. She’s panning for gold. And to do that, you have to sift through dirt. It might be some very good dirt she’s dismissing. But it is still dirt.

Be the gold.

The best way to get published, or to win a contest, is to shine. Don’t be mistaken for dirt. Don’t do anything that lets them reject you — because they’re looking to reject you unless you can show them you’re brilliant.

This all sounds very well, but in practice it has a terrible flaw. Mark Twain knew what that flaw was. He learnt it the hard way, and wrote about it in Roughing It: [Read more…]

Clock share: Writers vs. the competition

In one of his series of essays on ‘Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing’, Dean Wesley Smith takes aim at what he calls the ‘myth’ that writers compete with one another. He pours scorn on this ‘myth’, and on all who believe it. A short but representative sample:

The myth is simply that writers compete.

Of course, this is so far wrong, it shouldn’t be even talked about, but alas it’s still out there and going strong. In fact, I recently made the mistake of wondering over onto the Kindle boards and wasted a bunch of hours before I came to my senses. By the time I was finished with those hours, I knew I had to talk about this, since new writer after new writer talked about how they had to compete with all the other writers to get their books read.

He then goes on to paint a wonderful Technicolor picture of a world where there is an unlimited demand for fiction, pie for you and me and pasture for all the sheep, and the sky’s the limit, baby. Now, I do not know what religion Mr. Smith adheres to, but I am a lifelong devotee of what Kipling calls the Gods of the Copybook Headings. And one of the Copybook Headings, which people like Mr. Smith seem never to have heard of, is this:

Trees do not grow up to the sky. [Read more…]