Big Event

First, the official bits:

LPI celebrates a great summer of reading with the End of Summer Blog Event. Monday through Friday, August 24 – 28, we’ll feature author and editor profiles on the LPI Blog. Many author profiles will include giveaways, so please come visit for your chance to get to know Lyrical Press and win prizes.

We’ll round out the week with two live blogcasts:

Saturday, August 29, 6 – 9PM Central Time: Author Chat

http://lyricalpress.blogspot.com

Many, many LPI authors will be joining in the fray while Editor in Chief Emma Wayne Porter announces giveaway winners and hands out even more free goodies. Readers are invited to ask questions, hang out, and get to know the people behind all those stories.

Sunday, August 30, 6 – 9PM Central Time: Editor Chat

http://lyricalpress.blogspot.com

During this live blogcast, the LPI editorial staff gets its day in the hotseat. Readers are invited to give their opinions on what kind of stories they want to read. Authors are invited to ask questions about submission guidelines, and maybe even pitch an idea or two. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to speak directly to publishing staff, and be heard!

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And now for the unofficial bits:

Both blogcasts will be held right on the LPI Blog, and we’re expecting a lot of author traffic. All the free ebook winners accumulated in the author profiles will be announced during the blogcasts, though people won’t have to be present to win. We’re often so all-business at LPI, I’m really looking forward to getting everyone together to just hang out and have some fun in real time.

Sunday’s chat with the editors will be a free-for-all. Authors, if you’re shopping for a publisher, here’s your chance to talk directly to LPI staff about how things work in-house, what all the acquiring editors are looking for, maybe some talk about how digital publishing differs from print.

Readers, this chat will be great for telling us what type of stories you like to see, your shopping preferences, and basically anything you want to talk about. Editors so rarely get to speak directly with readers, I think it’ll be a great opportunity for both sides.

Hope to see you there!

Argh

It’s true. My xbox has succumbed to the red ring of death. No more lunchtime drum breaks until it’s fixed. Of course, it might be a good thing, as repeated Run To The Hills fails have given me an inferiority complex, but still — we’re all very sad.

Packing it up to send it for service excited the cats to no end, however. In order to catch the UPS guy, I had to pack it up in about half an hour, with not a single suitable box in the house and no bubble wrap.

I solved that problem easily enough, but have you ever tried to pack something in a hurry with the help of three bored and lonely cats? I’d get one out of the box and stop the other from shredding the foam just in time to stop Booger from getting his whiskers stuck to the packing tape.

(No one — and I repeat, no one — must ever tell el Jeffe what happened to his roll of stuff that goes under laminate flooring.)

Wake Me When School Starts

You can always tell how busy I am by how often I blog. Obviously, things have been a bit crazed around here, juggling work with family. We’re sticking with the theory that things will settle down once the kids are back in school.

Yeah, I know better.

We’ve also got a huge end of summer event  coming up the last week of August on the LPI blog. Next there’s a new promotion model workshop to contend with, now that consumers have steered ebook distribution into oddly familiar waters.

In other news, I’m so not enjoying my preliminary heart attack over the Microsoft Word custom xml schema meshigas. Did I mention our entire, revolutionary and custom-made production system runs (in part) on said schema?

There’s also a burgeoning conspiracy theory in this house that if federally or state funded universities a/o government entities commit seriously to etextbook technology, digital publishing could become the next industry facing government regulation. National ebook care, anyone?

Somehow, the highly capitalistic Tower of eBabel doesn’t make me cry so much at night anymore.

I’ll leave you with that troubling thought. Enjoy. 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well, vacation’s a bit of a misnomer, I have to say, but I’ve been so quietly lately I figured I should explain myself.

I’m in rather a holding pattern, it seems, quietly watching the industry we all knew and loved change utterly from one minute to the next. Even something so basic as the ISBN is in flux, new markets are emerging, old ones are collapsing. What’s been standard business practice for years is being warped and twisted and wrung for its last penny by whichever enterprise has the biggest, most shameless vise, all wrapped up in shiny red “groundbreaking” packages.

I seem to go from excitement to outrage to apathy and all points in between, worrying about how to protect our authors, worrying which risks are viable and which will turn out to be mistakes. And of course there’s always “how to make buying a digital book a better experience than torrenting it” and “was Netflix on to something” debates to really keep the graymatter spinning.

I do take the occasional step back far enough to realize this is the turning point digital publishing has been waiting for. Of course, that brings with it the hope that someone will come to their senses and preserve the best parts of tradition and quality control for the readers taking their first steps into what’s sometimes an insanely complicated process that used to be as simple as buying a book, finding somewhere quiet to read it, and opening the cover.

In a nutshell, I think I’ve spent my summer vacation thinking too much. Boring of me, but it’s certainly an interesting time.

Ten Things…

You will never hear an editor say:

1)      “Nah, let’s leave it that way. We’ll just put a glossary at the end of the book so readers will know what you meant.”

2)      “Just use Babelfish.”

3)      “Don’t worry about it. Readers never catch geography or history errors.”

4)      “This love scene is way too hot.”

5)       “It’s just an ebook.”

6)      “God kills a kitten every time you edit out a ‘that.’”

7)      “Oh hell, yeah! I think an entire chapter in text-speak would be awesome.”

8)      “Leave the head-hopping. No one will notice. Or send hate mail.”

9)      “There’s nothing for it but to put three pages of pure exposition in chapter one.”

10)   “What this book needs…is more exclamation points.”

I Knew It

http://tinyurl.com/ljwwzn

In Defense Of…

With RWA Nationals almost upon us, and this topic still a hot one behind the scenes and elsewhere, I think it’s worth saying the following:

From this side of the desk, it is very easy to tell which authors have been part of professional organizations like RWA. Those authors tend to have a better understanding of the business, approach edits with appropriate objectives in mind, and hold up their end of the bargain in a much more professional manner than those authors who haven’t benefited from time spent in a writing community.

Their work consistently shows better attention to detail, and stands a greater chance of pleasing genre readers. These authors read, understand and follow submission guidelines, and put their best foot forward every time. RWA authors also tend to enter the publishing world with more realistic expectations, which removes much stress from all sides of the equation.

So thank you, RWA (and other organizations like you), for cultivating professional attitudes, and coaching authors on the ins and outs — and ups and downs — of working with publishers, editors, dead lines, and promotion.

And on that note, my need to hire aforementioned editors (along with my need to implement a formal galley system) has knocked my Left Behind workshop off the table. Sorry, but there truly is no rest for the wicked…

Meow?!

If you’ve ever worried what long-term effect text-messaging, LOL or 733+ speak might have on literature, I have good news.

Child #1, who is fourteen now, has reported that one of her friends on the internet told her the following:

“However many exclamations you leave in your manuscript is how many cats you’ll have when you get old.”

Fear not. The future is in sarcastic, but good, hands.

Something New

Okay, so it’s already June 22nd, but I finally posted my first montly editor’s pick over on the LPI blog.

Poor Aubrey. We’ve had to sit on this first pick forever, thanks to some red tape.

Anyway, erotica snobs, rejoice. There are literary authors out there who can scorch your toenail polish. My first pick proves it beyond any shadow of a doubt.

And for the record, I did hesitate to make an editor’s pick: “But it reeks of favoritism!”

You’re darn right it does.

Follow-up on RWA

Okay, so I got to thinking today, which is never good.

Let’s say someone DID start a new romance organization specifically geared toward digital authors.

What would the “legitimate publisher” guidelines then be? What would they be based on?