The Post Pub

Good Blogging: Barbara Delinsky

Author Barbara Delinsky (Family Tree; The Secret Between Us) has tips for knitters on how to stylishly hide extra yarn:

You know you have a problem when you run out of places to hide your stash. You've used up most of your available closet space and have run up a bill at The Container Store on plastic bins that look nice when stacked. Some of the bins are semi-transparent, so you load these with your brightest yarn. Out of desperation, you've raided your basement and reposessed several large baskets that, years ago, held silk flowers. Now they're filled with yarn. What's next?

Read her blog for the answer.

Outmoded Authors

For those reading groups in search of their next masterpiece, check out the Outmoded Authors book challenge blog. Outmoded Authors seeks to "give some needed attention to authors who have fallen by the way side."  Authors on the challenge list include Djuna Barnes, W. Somerset Maugham, and Walter Scott. (Three names that have long been on this blogger's to do list.)

More Author Blogs

New author blogs have been added -- click here to view the list.

Good Blogging: Neil Gaiman

It's difficult to select just one example of good blogging by Neil Gaiman; he blogs daily, and it's all good. Here, he runs an excerpt of his latest work, Odd and the Frost Giants:

He walked over to the straw mattress, and climbed onto it. It didn't smell like his father at all, he realised, as he sat down on it, as he placed the crutch carefully against the wall, to pull himself up when he woke. It just smelled like straw. Odd closed his eyes, and he was asleep.

Dreams of darkness, of flashes, of moments, nothing he could hold onto, nothing that comforted him. And then into the dream a booming gloomy voice that said,

“It wasn't my fault.”

Visit Neil Gaiman's blog.

HarperCollins and MySpace Co-Brand an Environmental Book

HarperCollins and MySpace are co-branding a young adult book on how to save the environment.

This effort is engineered to succeed, for the following reasons:

1. By co-branding the book with MySpace, HC takes advantage of a built-in, impassioned audience looking for tools to help them make a difference;
2. The message of the book is at the forefront of peoples' minds (and the media's);
3. The book will capitalize on vanity by publishing the name of every single MySpace user who contributes a tip via the book's MySpace page.

I really like #3 -- it brings the phenomenon of user-generated media to the old-fashioned, prestigious world of publishing. Who doesn't want to see their name in a book?  But one has to wonder if the resulting list will drive the page count to 1,000 (that's a lot of dead trees and plastic fiber, recycled or not).

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so this was inevitable, and, partnerships-wise, probably pretty painless.  Nevertheless, it's exciting to see someone in publishing doing it right.

On a smaller scale, authors who've acquired a lot of Friends should be using MySpace, Facebook, Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing and other social networking sites in a similar manner:  as distribution channels for getting a message out to an audience that's already proven itself receptive. (And, in the case of bookshelf-cataloging sites, motivated to buy vs. borrow.) 

As for co-branding books with social sites... in the era of product placement, it's an intriguing direction to take.  If users weren't so fickle, it would seem smart for publishing companies to acquire some of these sites.  But users are fickle, and publishing companies may not be comfortable owning social sites that allow readers to promote other publishers' titles.  So... ay, there's the rub.  Still, a trend to watch.

Social Networking in Plain English

Looking for the $20 Powells.com gift card contest?  Click here.

Here's another video tutorial by commoncraft:

Author Assistant: Is it Helping Authors Sell Books?

A few weeks ago, Seth Godin, in promotion of his new biographies project, Squidwho, raised an issue I've been thinking about for years: why don't publishers get where the internet's going?  Godin says:

There are a few problems with this publisher-first approach. The first is that few readers know which authors are published by which publishers, so there's no way they're going to visit a particular site.

Publishers, like many organizations, want to control the conversation, want to own the web page, want to be sure that people come to them, as opposed to going where people are.

I think this is starting to change; but like Godin, I have to wonder why it's taken publishing so long to catch up to the rest of the business world.  Nobody goes to publishers' websites; why would they?  Readers know book titles; they know authors. They generally have no clue who published what. 

HarperCollins' new AuthorAssistant website building tool is a new marketing channel that allows their authors to create quick and easy web presences using pre-built templates.  It's not optimal for building an author brand (for starters, it's not portable if one were to switch publishers; and it creates very generic pages that all resemble each other and are all branded by the publisher, not the author), but if authors use AuthorAssistant as another marketing channel, supplemental to their own official sites or blogs, it could be useful.  It is, after all, another neutral to positive hit on search engines.

What do you think?  A lively conversation about AuthorAssistant -- and whether it's helpful or a waste of time and publisher resources -- is going at Joe Wikert's blog.

A Brief Lesson in Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us

I can't take credit for this video, which is a helpful, visual primer for social bookmarking. It's part of a video podcast series called commoncraft: Explanations in Plain English.  For beginners:

commoncraft offers similar, free video tutorials on subjects like wikis and RSS.

Good Blogging: Barbara Abercrombie

I began to think if I got hit by a bus my secret would be revealed: I work in chaos. I work knee deep in cat hair. I have every single draft of a failed novel, drafts of the new novel, all drafts of Courage & Craft, and something like 182 lined notebooks of my journal dating back to 1972. I have copies of handouts from every class I’ve taught since 1992. I have student papers I couldn’t bear to throw away. I have newspaper clippings saved for reasons I can’t remember. In one particularly scary drawer I have dozens of failed pens, a bottle of very hard White-Out, hundreds of business cards from perfect strangers, and a very good recipe for gazpacho that I copied down about the time Carter was president.  This office of mine is like one of those rooms that eventually has to be shoveled out. And shown on local evening news.

Barbara Abercrombie's book, Courage and Craft: Writing Your Life into Story (New World Library, August 2007), is currently available in stores.

Visit her blog.

Interview: Billy Mernit of Living the Romantic Comedy

Looking for the $20 Powells.com gift card contest?  Click here.

I'm pleased to present The Post Pub's first author-blogger interview and spotlight:  Billy Mernit.

Billy is the blogger behind Living the Romantic Comedy.  By day he's a UCLA writing instructor, a story analyst at Universal and a private script consultant.  He is also the author of the screenwriting how-to classic Writing the Romantic Comedy and the novel Imagine Me and You, to be published by Random House (Shaye Areheart) in April 2008.

I selected Billy as the premiere interview for the site because he treats blogging as a craft. On Living the Rom Com (as insiders refer to it), he consistently delivers thought-provoking essays in the spirit of film and cultural critics like David Denby and Maureen Dowd.  His focus:  contemporary and classic films, books, cultural trends, the writing craft, and dating, all seen through the lens of that genre we call "romantic comedy".

Keep reading to view his tips to newbie bloggers about finding a focus and building an audience.

On to the interview:

How long have you been blogging?

Nearly 2 and a half years.  I started in June of 2005.

What got you interested in starting your own blog, Living the Romantic Comedy?

There was a lot of it going around. I felt like I was already late to an ongoing party.  Others writers spoke of having blogs as if it was an obvious necessity, like a cyber-business card: Here are my loafers and this is my blog.