Week in Review 1/10/2016

Welcome to the week that was.

In last week's review

Jennifer R. Donohue asked:

Actually, on the topic of newsletters/reminders/what have you, it would probably benefit me to find out what newsletter exactly lets everybody know about PitMad and SFFPit and all that nonsense, because I have literally always heard about it day of, if not day after. And of course I hadn't worked on my twitter pitch yet for any of my finished novels, no, that would make too much sense.

I don't know the answer to that since I don't pay any attention to either, but I'm sure one of our readers will know. Readers?

The Sleepy One continued our conversation about blogs used as website:

"The biggest problem with using a blog as a website is that a blog has time stamps."

You can set up Wordpress to have a static template as your home page versus having your blog as a landing page. So it looks like a website and you won't have time stamps on your home page. You can create as many pages as you'd like in addition to your static home page and blog page (which you can name whatever you'd like--like news--so it doesn't look like a blog you don't update).

One thing that exasperates me to no end on blogs is the lack of date stamps! Posts from 2013 that have become outdated … no way to tell.

Yes there are ways to fix this, and set comments to stun off, but surely it's just easier to have a website as a website and a blog as a blog?

In the end it only matters that you've got some sort of designated space in Cyberia where you can be found.

Julie M. Weathers said:

I'm setting up a separate email account for strictly business this year. The one I have is professional sounding, but I have been hacked a couple of times and had agents email me to ask if I sent them something. That is not a good situation. Setting up a separate account just seems like a good idea. Less chance of accidentally spamming agents.

Oh my godiva yes! Have an email account you don't use for anything but your professional stuff. MUCH less chance of it being hacked if it's not the same email you use to sign up for the Lettuce and Kale Digest Review.

April asked

How necessary is it that my Web site is my name? Like JaneSmith.com or whatever?

Someone's already staked their claim on my name's Web site, even though they aren't doing anything with it (it's basically blank with some "if this is your page..." text). I've been waiting for years to snatch it up when they forget to renew it or whatever, but no dice. I used to own the .net of my name, but people would always get confused and go to the .com that I didn't own and tell me my site is broken. :/

Right now I have a short phrase as my url (I'm too embarrassed to link to it right now, I need to work on it), but it doesn't have my name in it. Is that a big no-no as a writer hoping to get noticed?

Well, there's this

Bill Cameron's URL uses a dash: http://www.bill-cameron.com/

Patrick Lee's URL adds fiction to his name: http://www.patrickleefiction.com/

Andrew Grant's URL adds books to his name: http://www.andrewgrantbooks.com/

Robin Becker's URL adds Z (as in Zombie!) to her name : http://www.robinzbecker.com/

Jenz had a very good point about buying domain names:

Tip: if you do a domain name search through a host or domain registrar, and you don't buy it right away, someone else will. Vultures watch for that and buy up names that people are searching in the hopes of getting you to pay them extra to get it back. Don't search if you aren't ready to buy, and once you find it, buy it.

On Monday I was on my soapbox about ineffective twitter promotion

E.M. Goldsmith asked

Is Twitter even effective for promotion? 

As part of more than just a  series of tweets about your book, yes.

Lucie Witt answered:

Reading the comments and looking at my bookshelf. Realizing over the past two years most of the new authors whose books have found a warm, cozy home on my shelf I discovered through twitter.

Not one of them sent me a promo tweet, though. Most were just authentically themselves, I thought they were cool/funny/smart people, and I decided to check out their books.

That said, someone I think is cool/smart/funny on Twitter would definitely get special consideration if they sent me a tweet akin to Janet's revised tweet above.

Everyone else's promo tweets generally get ignored. I never follow back writers who only tweet promotional stuff, no matter how much I might actually like the author.

brianrschwarz noted:

For some reason, when I look at the twitter icon on the left bar of the blog, the "follow Janet Reid" is in French. The French word for follow is "Suivre", which looks an awful lot like the english word "Survive" when my eyes attempt to convert a French word on a mostly English page (with some spattering in Carkoonian) back to English, so I always read this as Survive @Janet_Reid. And, quite frankly, this is hilarious.

 Hilarious? My intimidation tactics are failing miserably. I better go refuel my Hello Kitty flame thrower.

kdjames said

Twitter used to be a lot more fun. Now it's mostly rage and promo, and I spend less time there (more time writing, yay!). Janet was actually one of the first people to talk to me on twitter when I joined. Someone retweeted something of hers and I thought she was funny, so I followed and tweeted to her. It was late at night and she was still in the office, drinking scotch and having an impromptu dance party. Or so she said. I suspect she was actually just taking a quick break from crushing hopes and dreams, as sharks do.

I agree. Rage and promo seems to be most of it. I'm on Twitter much less these days, but it's still not something writers can just blithely ignore.

Kae Ridwyn asked:

How do you know if the twitter account that follows you is a real person or a bot? And another related question: What should you do about the bot followers: Block them? Report them? Ignore them? What is best?

We've traveled into unknown territory for me here. I don't pay any attention to that stuff. If someone annoys me I block them. If someone spams me with "buy my book" and it's clear they're doing this a lot (I look at their recent twitter feed) I report them as spam.  Other than that, I just tweet.

roadkills-r-us cracked me up with this:

Since you asked, I have a question!

I have a new book, and I want it to get popular. Should I send you a tweet about that at 2AM or 5:34AM, which is when your email showed up in my inbox? I'm thinking I should just have the book delivered to your door at 2AM. That way you can read it. If you like it, it helps keep you awake until 5:34AM when you send emails. If it's boring, you get some much needed shark sleep.

That was the takeaway, right?

-Anxious in Austin

P.S. I remembered how much you like Italics, so I threw some in!

Tuesday was a checklist for who should be on your mailing list, and more importantly who should NOT.

kd james had a very important point:

I'm in agreement with items 1 and 2 on this list.

Items 3-6 make me feel stabby. I'm not prepared to say this is bad advice, exactly. It makes sense and I have a good deal of respect for Janet's experience on this topic. But so help me, if every writer I ever met at a conference or with whom I have a personal connection or who belongs to the same groups I do or who reads my blog starts sending me email every time they publish a new book . . . I'm gonna need bail money.

I'll just reiterate the advice to think like a reader and give a good deal of consideration to how you'd react to being on the receiving end. If you do decide to send email to people referenced in 3-6, tailor that email so it's short and sweet and doesn't go on for a thousand words of chatty "news," and I might consider aiming for something other than your jugular.

I should have made that much more clear. You get to email those folks on 3-6 exactly once, and yes yes yes, it needs to be VERY short.

Dave Bridger had a alternative to MailChimp (which many of you found not very intuitive):

I found MailChimp a bit head scratchy too, so started using its little sister TinyLetter. Zero bells and whistles, but I don't need things like autoresponders. For now, at any rate. It's intuitive and nicely minimalist. And free. I recommend it.

Her Grace, The Duchess of Kneale said:

2. Since then, not a single name has signed up. I believed it was bad manners to add people to your mailing list if they hadn't specifically requested it. Am I incorrect?

3. I hate those little pop-up windows that beg you to sign up for someone's newsletter. Yet when I bemoaned that to a fellow author, she shared my misery... and her conversion to the dark side. She said that ever since she put up that stupid little pop-upon her web site, her mailing list more than doubled. She also swears by the power of her mailing list.

4. I am not convinced. Until I can actually get a mailing list, I'm having a hard time seeing its value. But how do I create a mailing list without offending people?

5. I vote Julie M Weathers be made exempt from the three-post limit rule.

6. I'm really enjoying these topics on promotion. I've learned a lot and am currently putting much of this advice to good use, as I've got a book out in about three weeks. Hoping for more on this topic.

2. Yes.

3. Yup.

4. See #3

5. I agree

6. Since you've not provided us with a link or title, how are we going to buy it?

On Wednesday we discussed the perils of being in a poorly published anthology while you are querying a project

Colin Smith asked:

Do anthology opportunities come to you based on work you've done (e.g., "Loved that article on your blog about kale farming. Care to write an chapter for my upcoming kale anthology?"), or do you hunt them down? If the latter, what are good ways to do this?

All of the above. Some anthologies like "Best of" are by invite only. Some that are edited by well known anthologists such as Ellen Datlow are also invite only. Some are by submission and invitation, such as the last two Bouchercon anthologies. "Calls for submissions" are likely announced but I don't know where. Our commenters will!

Or as the Duchess of Kneale put it so well:

There's invitation-only anthologies, hybrid anthologies, and open call anthologies. The open calls' guidelines are easily found by a yellow-belt in Google Fu.

E.M. Goldsmith asked:

So, say you are a big name writer with a proper shark approved sort of agent, and someone invites you to contribute a short story or chapter to an anthology, would you (writer) refer the requesting person to the agent to negotiate for the one of x number of stories/ chapters in theoretical anthology?

It depends on the client. I review all contracts signed by clients so as to keep them out of hot water, but that's not an industry standard.

Lisa Bodenheim said:

I had a poem published in an anthology back in the predigital age which I found via an advertisement and, of course, I had to buy the book in order to get my poem published for free.

Ah yes, pay to play. Those are the anthologies that DON'T count as a pub credit. They are simply ways for people to put your money in their pocket. Even the most charitable of anthologies (such as the Bouchercon anthology) give copies to those who are selected for contribution.

Remember Yog's rule: money flows toward the writer.

Colin Smith asked:

Let's say I get a story published in SciFi Stories Monthly, and a story published in Horror Nasties Quarterly, and a story published in AHMM (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Mag). I then query you with my mystery novel.

Question: Do I only mention my AHMM story, or do I mention all three?

Follow-up Question: Even if I don't mention the other two, the chances are your Google super powers would soon discover them. Would the multiple published genres bother you, or would you only care about the novel submitted? I'm guessing it wouldn't bother you, but I've been wrong before... :)

Here's where personalizing a query is a good idea. For me saying "I've had several short stories published in magazines including AHMM" is a positive thing. You don't need to mention where the other ones were. For OTHER agents SFSM or HNQ might be more persuasive depending on what novel you're querying.

And let's all remember, we're not googling to assemble a list to trip you up. We're mostly googling just to get a sense of what you're like. If you're not crazy, and you don't have sixteen self-published books for sale (that you neglected to mention in the query) one of which is this novel you're querying for, it's all good.

Madeline Mora-Summonte asked:

A question for Janet - I was under the impression that a number of those big "Best of" anthologies are made up of stories already published. How do those anthology editors decide what markets, what magazines, etc to look at in the first place in order to find the stories?

Yes, the Best Of anthologies are of previously published work. I don't know for sure how the pieces are selected. My guess is that the magazines send in their idea of the best work they've published that year, and that the working editor (not the celebrity editor) does a whole lot of research and reading too. 

If what you're asking is whether authors send work to the Best of editors, the answer is I don't think so. I've never done it.

Janice Grinyer asked:

They suggested I write an article concerning wildfire on a personal basis/experience and submit it to certain magazines for publication. This way I would be able to add these caveats to my proposal, strengthening my writer's credentials. The problem is it would take time, postponing querying. As with all things, the question is, "Is this the right thing to do?" 

It won't hurt you to have a writing credit, but those big glossies are hard to crack, and often use writers they know. There's a Writers Guide to Magazine submissions that might give you some guidance here.

The question is will it help you enough to compensate for the time it will take from other things (economics majors call this opportunity cost.)  It's hard for me to assess that. What I do know is writing ONE article isn't as helpful to your writing career as having a portfolio of them. Having a portfolio of published articles means you've worked at it consistently for at least a couple years. 

You do not need writing credits for a novel. You do not need to have been published before at ALL. You're the only one who can calculate where you want to spend your time. The only thing I can tell you is that querying for articles is like querying for a novel, only faster. There's no slam dunk about it at all.

dianastaresinicdeane asked:

I have a serious question: do people read/buy anthologies? I ask this because after several years of working in a library, I found that we regularly withdrew anthologies from the collection because they never circulated, no matter how much we promoted them. Perhaps it was just our population of readers?

That's very interesting to hear! The two anthologies I know most about (Bouchercon 2014 and Bouchercon 2015) were mostly sold to mystery readers at Bouchercon itself. Libraries could certainly buy it if they chose to but it was a trade paper edition which I know libraries don't favor, and it may not be the best book to add to a collection in terms of collection management.

But, I love those anthologies and I hope the people who bought them will too! You can still get them at Amazon (all proceeds benefit the Long Beach library system)

On Thursday we discussed ethnicity and pen names. As you might imagine, it generated the most comments of any blog post this week.

Lisa Bodenheim made a very good point:

Diversity is important. I think another part of the problem is where books are shelved in bookstores. One young African American woman commented elsewhere that she writes romances and some bookstores shelve African American romance books on the African American shelves rather than the romance shelves.

This affects selling and visibility to the general public. 

I don't think I've ever sought out the African American shelf in a bookstore despite my long standing interest in African history and African writers. As you might imagine, my first stop is crime, my second stop is fiction, my third stop is history. By then, I've found something to buy. Clearly I need to branch out.

Gimme made a point that my word choice may not have been the best:

That white guy pretending to be Chinese was seriously offensive, regardless of the reason for or effectiveness of his ploy. I adore your blog, Ms. Reid, and have for many years, but it's the epitome of white privilege to find the whole situation "hilarious" instead of a hurtful slap in the face. 

I do find it absurd (as in laughing in disbelief) that someone thinks assuming a Chinese name will get them more attention, when your entire blog comment above reinforces that prejudice is alive and evil in the world.

I read Sherman Alexie's blog post on the situation, and my sense of it is that he WAS trying to include more underrepresented voices in his Best Of anthology. He was Not Happy to discover this "colonial theft."

And the reason he knew about it? The poet outed himself. Even he knew that this was going to be a Big Hairy Deal.

Here's the article Sherman Alexie wrote.

Here's why this situation is different from the one our Questioner has: This is our questioner's pen name, not a name she's purposely chosen to subvert the "politically correct poetry business." In fact, she's worried about her name being misinterpreted.

I think motivation matters here. 

And if you read the entire article you'll see that Sherman Alexie, even knowing of the 'colonial theft' chose to keep the poem.

It's a very interesting article, and it's clear there are no easy answers here.

And in the end, notice Sherman Alexie's first 11 winnowing factors are mostly concerned with not favoring people he knows. THAT'S actually the most revelatory thing here. Publishing is an insider business. It's easier to be published if agents and editors know you. There's a reason a lot of authors have "used to work at Publishing Company" in their author bio. And publishing is godawful at hiring diversely. 

We ran a crackerjack intern program at FinePrint for several years. The people who came through our program went on to get publishing jobs. Our placement rate was close to 100% for people who elected to stay in publishing.  And by and large, those faces were white. We advertised on BookJobs.com, a website that is available to anyone. Yet, our applicants were white. And we had so many of them we didn't really look elsewhere. 

I don't know how to solve that problem. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

E.M.Goldsmith said

People make a lot of odd assumptions about me based on my name

And I think that's exactly the problem here. It's the making assumptions. That was the point I tried to make about assumptions being the problem of the assumer. Yet it's true that assumptions do create problems for the other person as well as Gimme points out.

I love how this woman just skewered a man who was rude about her name:

LaTosha squashes Evan

And Adib Khorram from Kansas City linked us to this, which also just cracked me up:

And Lucie Witt makes an excellent point

I think we have to be careful with the "I just want good books" reasoning. It is undoubtedly true, but can sometimes unintentionally bury the problem - people of color are writing great books, but those books aren't making it into the shelves at the same rates. When they do, they often aren't treated the same by bookstores, publicists, etc. THAT is what we need to fix.

I found Colin Smith's statement very interesting:

One of the things Stephen King harps on repeatedly in ON WRITING is "telling the truth" and being "honest." To me, that means if your novel is set in a middle class neighborhood in the 1960s, your characters will undoubtedly be white. To put a black family in that situation for any reason that has nothing to do with story would NOT be telling the truth. And that story reason ought to reflect the reality of middle class America in the 1960s, and not try to superimpose 21st century ideas, just to be "diverse" or PC. If you're going to tell it, tell it like it is/was.

Because of course there was a thriving  black middle class in the 60's. The reason you don't think there was, or that a black family living in suburbia IS the story is cause you don't know about it. And that's cause the black middle class was invisible to white America.  Black families certainly weren't on television. The 70's sitcoms with black actors weren't about the middle class. It's not till you get to the Huxtables in the 80s that you have the black middle class on TV. And yet, black people have been going to college, owning homes, entering professions (in other words, doing all those middle class things) for more than 100 years.

This is not a new problem. It took a lot of activism to get "women's topics" legitimized in history departments as suitable for research and study. Even now kids get taught about big male-dominated events much more than "smaller" events about how people really lived.

One of the best examples of how the travails of daily life affects national politics is found in Robert Caro's brilliant and seminal first volume of the now five-volume biography of LBJ.

LBJ is from the Hill Country of Texas, and for decades all the water that was used farm houses was drawn by hand from wells, and carried into the home. LBJ was one of the men who got electricity to the Hill Country. It dramatically altered women's work on the farm.  It made their lives easier by a factor of 10. Hill Country people NEVER forgot this, and supported him staunchly in every election, including the 1948 Senate campaign that earned him ironic nickname "Landslide Lyndon".  You need to understand about water in the Hill Country to understand LBJ's rise to power.

And I liked what Julie M. Weathers pointed out:

A conversation got started a few months ago about demanding publishers be forced to publish according to quotas. I asked "And how do you propose to force buyers to buy a certain quota of diverse books? Publishing is a business. They can't stay in business if they can't sell what they publish. The trick is to find more talented diverse authors."

"No, they just need to publish diverse books regardless."

Publishing is indeed a business. Not all that clever of course, but most industries aren't.  (I can still remember when Publishing was "shocked" by the success of Terry McMillan because "black folk don't read."  Yea, right.)

A lot of people of every color, and genre would like to have a quota system of publishing books. Me, I'd like the quota to be 100% of my authors must be published each and every year, or all publishers have to pay me a fine.

When I am Queen of the Known Universe, I might institute that.

In the meantime, that's the one thing that we as readers CAN influence: buy and buzz books outside our own cultural parameters. Seek them out. Talk about the ones that resonate with us. Think about the ones that don't and why they don't (always an interesting opportunity for self-discovery.)

For those of you who read crime fiction, there's a terrific newish author Rachel Howzell Hall whose first book LAND OF SHADOWS I read and loved.

I think I was the first person to have her book on my Library Thing shelf in fact, because I read it in a very early ARC. If there is a dearth of African American writers on your shelf, and you'd like to fix that, her books are a terrific start.  If you just like to read good books, she's a good author to buy too.

And Kelsey Hutton said something here that really spoke to me:

Thank you to folks who have shared from their personal experience, especially Gimme. Debate is important, but it often means laying your life out time after time for other people to examine. It can be wearying.

Friday was a writing contest. Results will be posted on Monday.

Tuesday is a rant. Don your asbestos underpants.

Subheader stays the same this week.

Have a great week.