Sheri Gormley

It is incredible to see that in just six months, Barking Rain Press has cranked out six new titles:

• Curiously Twisted Tales by P.S. Gifford
• First Communion: A Collection of Modern Irish Stories by Jack Scoltock
• Revenge by Gabrielle Faust and Solomon Schneider
• In the Autumn of the Unfortunates by Christopher Treagus
• River Bottom Blues by Ricky Bush
• Of Machines & Magics by Adele Abbot

We incorporated on September 19th, 2011 as a non-profit publisher, and looking at that small (but growing!) list on Amazon.com is very satisfying for a host of reasons, but most importantly, they represent promises kept to both myself and to others. Read more »

Well, it’s done. VT has closed it doors, and while I have mixed feelings about that, for the most part I believe that it’s for the best…

Read more »

Because words are the tools that authors use, I’d like to plug the free “A.Word.A.Day” (AWAD) email from Wordsmith.org:

“There’s a new exhibit in Seattle showcasing props from the Harry Potter series. As I make my way through it, I see children holding magic wands in their little fingers, pretending to cast spells.

If only writers had a book of spells we could use to make things happen!

It turns out we do. It’s called a dictionary. It has all the magical words we need (though some assembly is required). We can use these words to convince (from Latin vincere: to overcome), to motivate (from movere: to move), to inspire (from inspirare: to breathe [life] into), and more.”

AWAD will introduce you to spells new and old, with a single word each day. It’s a free and easy way to build your writing vocabulary.

I highly recommend it.

Here is what I hope will be a growing list of people and organizations to contact about getting a review for your small press book. Feel free to post or send me your ideas — I’ll be happy to add them to the list!

Read more »

Well, VT has a functional website again. It’s still a little buggy, and we’re still missing a ton of content, but at least we don’t have a static “under construction” message for a website anymore.

Some of our book pages don’t show all the formats available… and lots of our 2010 releases are missing totally. I’ve managed to repost all of our press releases, and I’ve posted two author bios, but none of the events are showing, and I have dozens of author appearances and news to repost. Our newsletter program needs to be set up from scratch, and oh yeah, I’m about 3 books behind in our publication schedule.

This is starting out to be one heckuva year. At least the Mariners are looking good… Read more »

OMG.

That’s all I can think right now. OMG.

Our website is dead. Finito. End of life. Sigh.

It appears that someone with too much time on his hands hacked the website and deleted our database. But that’s okay, because we had a backup system installed, and we have a fairly current backup of the database. Whew!

The only problem is, the backup is corrupt. Read more »

Let a woman in your life,
And patience hasn’t got a chance,
She will beg you for advice,
Your reply will be concise,
She will listen very nicely
and then go out and do precisely
What she wants — Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady

I was reminded today of the Writer’s Workshop I did for Orycon. One of the authors had written a fairly interesting fantasy piece, and aside from the usual “show don’t tell” advice, I mentioned that I thought he might want to revisit the beginning, because it was a little slow. In fact, it didn’t start to get interesting until page 11 for me, and if I hadn’t promised to read through the whole thing and mark it up for the workshop, I would have put it down after about page 2.

The other two commentators in the workshop expressed the same opinion (and I was not the first to go, so they were by no means following my lead). So, here we have an unpublished author who pays a fee to get his “manuscript in progress” professionally critiqued, and all three reviewers comment that he should probably rewrite the beginning to make it more engaging.

Naturally, you would expect that since he paid for this session, he would be taking notes, asking questions, gathering as much feedback as possible so that he could incorporate the suggestions into his manuscript and get it ready for submission. Instead, he told us all, very politely, that he had already tried it that way and it didn’t work out, so he really needed to leave it exactly like it was, thank you very much.

So he paid the critique fee… to basically ignore the critque? Read more »

I got an email back from my college friend who writes fantasy novels for one of the “the majors.” I asked her why there seemed to be so much controversy about eBooks vs. print from established authors. Here’s what she told me:

I think publishing is threatened by far more than a new format. I think fear of piracy followed by fear of not getting paid are the two biggest reasons many writers react as you saw.  Although a print book can be pirated (as anyone who has dealt with Russia or China knows), it’s hard.  Breaking the code on an e-reader is much, much easier (and people hack calculators for fun, without profit).
 
As for paid…  Contracts usually base pay on a percentage of the cover price.  If a $25.00 book is sold for $5, even if there is a huge raise in percentage, well…  You can do the math.
 
Basically, I think you ran into a lot of fear over what may be a dying industry.  Fewer readers, more competition from writers past whose estates are delighted to sell for a pittance, more spin-offs.  And electronic books have added to that in a big way.  I’ve read numerous columns that basically boil down to, “why read a new book that will cost you, when you can get a free classic on Google?” I don’t know if I’ll be making a living in a few years…  

That’s an interesting bit of commentary from the trenches — especially in regards to the last part. The part about “free.” What is our obsession with “free”? I see this more and more, and it baffles me. Read more »

Today’s panel at Orycon was a bit more civil, but that doesn’t mean the controversy over eBooks vs. print books was any less pronounced. The panel was titled Paper’s Place in the Future—Physical Books vs. eBooks. My co-panelists were Michael Briggs (husband of Patricia Briggs, the author GoH), author James F. David, Orycon webmaster Rick Lindsley and author Paul Guinan.

In the end, we all agreed that print books and eBooks each had their place and audience… but much is still undefined. Rick noted that for those of a certain generation, who grew up reading books only in print, there is a certain comfort level and familiarity with the format that leads to a marked preference for print books. However, most of the kids growing up today are accustomed to doing everything electronically, and they want to read books on their cell phones and eReader devices.

DRM (digital rights management) was a flash point today. James said that as an author, he truly appreciates DRM because it ensure that he will be compensated for each and every copy of his books that are sold. Michael, on the other hand, discussed how he had inadvertently purchased some eBooks using his wife’s Fictionwise account… and when he tried to open them on his own eReader, he was told that his device wasn’t authorized to view the files (because they weren’t purchased using his account Fictionwise notes the serial number of your eReader device and grants DRM access based on that information). Read more »

I just wrapped up my first panel at this year’s Orycon in Portland, Oregon, which was titled Twitter Novels, Kindle, eBooks, Podscast and the Market. I was one of three panelists; the other panelists were Dianna Rodger and Michael Briggs (husband of Patricia Briggs, the author GoH).

I brought my Sony eReader and my iPhone for “show and tell,” so to speak, and we launched into a surprisingly heated discussion. There were a good number of published authors in the audience, and many of them were venting about how the NY publishers are giving them a raw deal on eBook royalties. Many of them seemed quite angry, in fact. I suppose I didn’t help matters by saying that VT does not believe in charging the same price for print and eBook formats, because print requires the additional expense of printing, and eBooks don’t. Therefore, eBooks should cost less than print books.

One very passionate author immediately launched into a salvo about how the editor, the artist and the author deserve to be paid for their work, and it shouldn’t matter what the format is. And while I definitely agree that all the people who work on a title deserve to be paid for their efforts, I was merely pointing out the public perception of value. Read more »