Author: Lynne Cantwell

Lynne Cantwell grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. She worked as a broadcast journalist for many years; she has written for CNN, the late lamented Mutual/NBC Radio News, and a bunch of radio and TV news outlets you have probably never heard of, including a defunct wire service called Zapnews. But she began as a fantasy writer (in the second grade), and is back at it today. She currently lives near Washington, DC. Learn more about Lynne at her blog and at her Amazon author page.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Nowhere, I submit, is the upheaval in the publishing world more apparent than at writing conventions. At last year’s World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, I attended a panel during which an agent (or maybe she was an editor) made some disparaging remarks about self-publishing, and a few audience members stood up and respectfully explained to her why she was wrong.

Fast-forward to 2012. This year’s World Fantasy Convention, in Toronto last weekend, featured a whole panel discussion about e-publishing.

One end of the dais seemed to be spewing dinosaur breath. The former editor-in-chief of Del Ray (Random House’s speculative fiction imprint), Betsy Mitchell, complained that her business is drying up; she said indie novelists aren’t willing to pay $3,500 for the kind of top-notch professional editing job she can offer. (I wondered whether it had ever occurred to her that the vast majority of indies simply can’t afford her.) Next to her sat Robert Runté, an acquisitions editor for a small Canadian press, who called the indie trend of using beta readers “editing by crowdsourcing.” He also said he used to write reviews of speculative fiction novels for money – but “that job is gone.” Who’s taking up the reviewing slack? Bloggers, said Emily Craven (although apparently she doesn’t review books on her own blog). Continue reading “What a Difference a Year Makes”

Making Hay Out of a Hurricane

tobo at http://flickr.com/photos/71239428@N00/2853887676By the time you read this, it may be irrelevant. I’m writing to you on Monday, home from work due to the expected wallop of Hurricane Sandy on our forewarned-but-still-most-likely-unprotected heads, and hoping that I can finish this and send it off before the power inevitably goes out.

But maybe it won’t be irrelevant. The weather forecasters are saying that people in the path of the storm should be ready to be without power for up to a week. With NaNoWriMo starting on November 1, a week without power could be a very bad thing right now.

And bad weather happens all the time. Well, maybe not if you live someplace nice. But even paradise gets rain, wind, and the occasional freak hailstorm. Our job as writers is to capitalize on that inevitability. Continue reading “Making Hay Out of a Hurricane”

Check This Out – Borrow eBooks from Libraries

Did you know you can borrow eBooks from your local library? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. Forbes reported in June that 58 percent of library patrons don’t know they can borrow eBooks, and only two percent have ever done it.

That’s not surprising, considering that traditional publishing houses have kept as tight a rein on their eBook sales to libraries as they have on eBook sales in general. Some of the Big Six reportedly don’t sell eBooks to libraries at all. The publishers that allow such sales insist that libraries purchase only DRM-locked books, and they limit the number of borrows for a single eBook copy. Why all the hoops? The big publishers are afraid that if library patrons find out they can borrow eBooks, it will eat into their sales – and, hence, their profits. That’s despite the fact that a large percentage of eBook borrowers are also eBook buyers. Continue reading “Check This Out – Borrow eBooks from Libraries”

Silver Screen Dreams

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an author in possession of an idea for a book, must be in pursuit of a fortune.* Alas, the dream of a million-dollar author contract has always been hard to realize. The difference today is that the goalposts have moved.

Back in the bad old days before the Internet, an aspiring author with a dream, but no publishing industry connections, basically had one hope: to find an editor who believed in his or her story enough to publish it. A lot of people submitted their stuff “over the transom” — i.e., they sent their unsolicited manuscripts to the publishing house, where they languished in a slush pile until somebody was assigned to box them up and send them back. Occasionally, an editor would publish something out of the slush pile and make a tidy sum thereby, which reinforced the idea that it could happen, no matter how dismal the ratio of slush-pile blockbusters to returns. Continue reading “Silver Screen Dreams”