Tag Archives: writing

I read po-tah-to . . .

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A couple of British researchers surveyed men and women about their reading habits and oh no! We read different things!

lol

The LA Times has bulleted some of the results (registration required). Here’s a couple:

* No male authors made the women’s top five, and no female authors made the men’s top five.

* Only four books made both top 20 lists.

You know what’s funny? Back (waaaay back) when I was an undergraduate and indulged in the conceit that being a writer meant being a literary writer, I assumed my audience would be male as well as female.

Now, I could care less about writing for men. No offense, men, I think you’re adorable but it’s complicated to communicate with you.

My dog training book probably appeals well to women, and my novels-in-progress are romances, so they skew to gal readers. Fortunately that means my writing is targeted at the largest market segment, in both cases.

But I’m thinking, it may be a bit trickier to do a commercially viable books if you’re a man . . . hmmmm. Unless of course you channel a Navaho & send your MS to Esquire. lol

I’ve entered!

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I sent a submission to Evil Editor’s “invent a synopsis” contest.

I chose Group 3: Little Girl Blue; The Midnight Diaries; The Monster Within; Portal to Murder; Raise the Buried Dead.

I’ll let you know if any of mine get picked.

In related news, it’s possible I’ve developed a low-grade e-crush on Evil Editor. Fortunately it will never get out of hand, thanks to the appalling cartoon he uses to represent his personage next to his posts. But omg his posts crack me up!

UPDATE: oooh, it’s not an invent-a-synopsis contest — it’s a pick the real synopsis from the fake synopses contest. LOL

UPDATE #2: My Contest Picks

Why you shouldn’t pay $500 for a copy

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People are putting copies of “Opal” on ebay, hoping to cash in on the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal. Today on Amazon, copies are still being offered for $80-120. But on ebay, bidding has cooled off. Prices were up in the $50 range yesterday. Not today.

This may be why: according to The Book Standard, about 12,000 copies were sold before Little, Brown pulled the book.

That’s a lot of copies. I’m no expert, but I can’t see the value going much higher than $50. Not for the foreseeable future. So if you own a copy and want to double your money, go for it. But if you’re thinking you’ll buy a copy at that price and flip it . . . maybe not such a good idea.

(For background see posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here and here.)

Inside Alloy

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The New York Observer has a piece up about Alloy Entertainment, the book packager that was called in to help Kaavya Viswanathan “write” How Opal. . . :

The convoluted authorial structure of Alloy books is anything but transparent.

“To me, all that stuff is such a black box,” said one author who has worked with the company. “They have writers who don’t exist, and they have writers who don’t really write the stuff, and they have one series supposedly by one author that are by many. There’s no one-to-one alignment between anything that gets produced and the producer. There’s no literary accountability.” 

Literary accountability, maybe not. We’ll see about legal accountability. As Booksquare writes in their post about Little, Brown’s decision not to revise Opal:

While we’re not cynical, we fully expect a lawsuit or two to be coming down the pike. ‘Cause this is America and suing is our national right.

(See other posts I’ve written here and here. And here and here.)

Bad agents beware

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Because Writer Beware has published its list of top 20 worst agents.

Via the blog kept by Writer Beware’s Victoria Strauss and A.C. Crispin, who also have an interesting post about what happens when a writer’s work is submitted to a publisher by an unprofessional or questionable agent. (Click “show original post” if all you see is comments. Their blog doesn’t support permalinks.)

The scandal that keeps on scandaling

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I guess if you’re going to plagiarize, you might as well plagiarize from more than one book.

The Harvard Crimson is now reporting it’s found passages from Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” that were lifted from Meg Cabot’s “The Princess Diaries” and Salman Rushdi’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories“(!!!).

And The New York Times (registration required) has published a piece reporting similarities between passages in Viswanathan’s book and passages in “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella.

This wasn’t a novel. It was a fricking medley.

(I previously blogged about this here.)

Query help. For writers.

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Found this morning via Miss Snark, who introduces this blogger, Evil Editor, as “[a]n editor, an honest to dog editor, [who] is critiquing query letters on his blog.”

I jumped over to check it out and this guy’s advice is worth it’s weight. Double worth it’s weight. Well. It would be double worth it’s weight if it were printed on something heavy, like, say, corrugated tin.

He takes query letters people have sent him, and prints them, once with his comments inserted and then once revised to accommodate his critique.

His comments are basically real-time “huhs?” that an editor/agent would experience each time the query writer blunders. They’re always illuminating and often funny. Here’s an example, from a suspense novel titled Coiled Revenge. Evil Editor’s comments are in brackets:

She escapes death when Tony barges in, using the key he stole from her apartment to save her. [He uses a key to save her? Who is this guy, MacGyver?]

It’s hard, because in a query letter, we’re trying to condense an entire novel down to a few paragraphs. So the inane can creep in. But we have to realize how off-putting it can be.

Evil Editor is a wonder resource. I’m adding it to my blogroll right now.

Look what I found down the rabbit hole

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Hi! I’m popping up to grab a bit of fresh air and blink in the light.

I’ve been following links from links on this Kaavya Viswanathan story.

I started with The Analytical Knife blog, and followed a link there to Lizzie Skurnick, fisking a Harvard Independent article based on an interview they did with her.

Skurnick also put up a link to this Slate ariticle by John Barlow, about his short stint as a book packager writer-for-hire.

I made a couple of side-trips on the way, but you’ll have to find them for yourself.

I think I need a rest now. Good stuff tho, all of it.

Package ‘er up

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Booksquare has a post up about the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal that raises the question behind the question:

It also makes one wonder why in the world a business like Little, Brown would spend a reported $500,000 on an unwritten book by a first-time author who was starting her academic career at a famously tough university.

For a possible answer, Booksquare links to this piece at Publisher’s Weekly that suggests How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life was purchased not as a novel, but as a product: an attractive author with an interesting backstory, matched up with a “test-marketed, packaged” story.

Makes sense to me.

Update: the story gets worse…