On Writing and Publishing

Preview Weekend  Get Your All-Access Pass and See What Members Love About AWP  You know that an AWP membership comes with a discounted conference registration and a subscription to The Writer’s Chronicle, but there is so much more. And it is yours to explore for three days, free of charge, from July 20–22, 2018. Here are some of the resources you will find upon logging in: Over 1,300 online articles on writing and teaching in our Features Archive Our Writer’s Calendar, with an up-to-date listing of events and publishing opportunities The AWP Job List, which provides the latest information on open jobs for writers Over 100 Career Advicearticles AWP’s Career Services Web Series, including our Writer to Agent Web Serieswith agents from Folio Literary Management We are offering three days of FREE access to see what an AWP membership is all about. Simply email awp@awpwriter.org with your first and last name or sign up below, and we will set . . .

A recent article in Poets & Writers points out that since 2012 sales of audiobooks have posted double-digit gains every years, including a whopping 34 percent boost in 2016. That year publishers sold nearly ninety million audiobooks, more than double the number they sold five years earlier. Thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and the ease of downloading titles online, revenue from the audiobooks at Simon & Schuster, for example, jumped nearly 40 percent last year. According to Audio Publishers Association, an industry trade group, publishers have sold nearly ninety million audiobooks, more than double the number they sold five years earlier. However, audiobooks sales account for less than 4 percent of the  roughly 2.7 billion books sold in all formats each year, but with overall books sales essentially flat and the once booming e-book sector declining, writers have new reason to pay close attention to the increasingly valuable audio . . .

They are known infamously as “gate keepers.” The men and women who throughout the long history of publishing make the decision on whether a book gets published. These mysterious editors who control the fate of every would-be writer hide away mostly in New York skyscrapers and decide what is worthy of publication. Or at least that is what most would-be novelists think. Perhaps the most famous editor of all book editors was Maxwell Perkins. Perkins published F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. They were his first famous writers but he would go onto publish a wide range of novelists, from J.P. Marquand to Erskine Caldwell to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, as well as, late in his editorial career, convince James Jones not to pen an autobiographical novel but write instead From Here to Eternity. You might ask: how did these editors become ‘gate keepers’? Well, they start in the . . .

Peace Corps Writers MFA Program: Now open for PCVs and RPCVs Do you want to earn your Master’s Degree in Creative Writing while serving in the Peace Corps? Or do it today as an RPCV and not have to step onto a college campus? Would you like to write a memoir or book about your Peace Corps experience? Here is your chance to do both! I have arranged with National University in California to offer an online only Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree program for Peace Corps writers. This MFA is sponsored by the National Peace Corps Association (NPCA). PCVs & RPCVs will receive a tuition discount. The tuition for the MFA is in the area of 20K. National University is the second-largest private, nonprofit institution of higher education in California and the 12th largest in the United States. It is one of the very few universities that offer a . . .

Are you inspired by your Peace Corps service? Do you have an affinity for writing? Looking to write a memoir or book about your Peace Corps experience? John Coyne (RPCV Ethiopia 1962-64), editor of Peace Corps Worldwide, has arranged with National University in California to offer an online MFA program in non-fiction, fiction and poetry writing for PCV and RPCV writers. Courses are currently under development and will be taught by published Peace Corps authors and National University faculty members. Coyne will teach the introductory class and serve as an adviser to Peace Corps students. The inaugural program is slated to begin in Fall 2016 – will be accepting a class of 15 exceptional students. The MFA is flexible program. Students can complete the degree in between one to two years, taking a single one or two-month class at a time. As the course is online, students have the opportunity to progress at their own pace. This also allows . . .

CAREER ADVICE Be a Literary Agent John Coyne profiles six literary agents and offers suggestions for that career path for the Association of Writers & Writers Programs Website. April 2016 I called a novelist friend (Mary-Ann Tirone Smith Cameroon 1965-67) and asked her if she knew of any MFA graduates who were employed as literary agents and she replied, “MFA graduates are writers, not agents.” She was categorically right, but she wasn’t totally correct. Just as there are book and magazine editors who also write fiction, nonfiction, or poems, there are also literary agents with BAs in English and/or MFAs in writing. Some later change horses and become agents, putting their own literary knowledge into play when advising their clients. Others continue to write but work as agents for the sake of having a steadier income while finishing their next novel or waiting for the last one to be made . . .

If you are interested in writing books, especially ebooks, you might want to check out Mike Shatzkin’s blogs on the net or his ebook entitled, The Shatzkin Files, Volume 1. Shatzkin has been involved in the publishing business for nearly 50 years. For the past two decades he has been focused on the digital changes in publishing. Recently he published a blog item about Hugh Howey. Howey is best known for the science fiction series Silo published on Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing system. Shatzkin quotes Howey: “Too few successful self-pubbed authors talk about the incredible hours and hard work they put in, so it all seems so easy and attainable. The truth is, you’ve got to outwork most other authors out there. You’ve got to think about writing a few novels a year for several years before you even know if you’ve got what it takes. Most authors give up before they . . .

  Reading the Winter 2016 issue of Authors Guild Bulletin I came across Angela Bole’s column on “Indie Publishing: A Primer” Bole is the CEO and executive director of the Independent Book Publishers Association and her current column in the issue covers all sorts of publishing in today’s world. However, her paragraphs on self-publishing were interesting for a number of reasons. She writes that the fast-growing segment of independent publishing is self-publishing, and that Bowker — the “world’s leading provider of bibliographic information” — reports that in 2013, 458,564 self-published titles came out, a jump of 17% since 2012, and 437% over 2008. There are basically two kinds of self-publishing, assisted self-publishing and DIY self-publishing. She is not a fan of DIY self-publishing, saying, “Considering the complexities of the publishing business, there are almost no circumstances in which I’d recommend a fully DIY self-publishing approach.” She goes onto write, “The . . .

The current issue of The Atlantic has a long article by Nicholas Dames entitled “The New Fiction of Solitude” where, according to Dames, “For an influential group of writers, the purpose of novels is to bear witness to the spectacle of aloneness.” In this article, Dames refers to a long, long conversation that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had with President Obama last September which was published a few months ago in The New York Review of Books. That “conversation” touched on a number of topics, from troubled relationship between Christianity and democracy to the fragility of public institutions. Dames (as did others) wondered why Obama focused time and attention on a novelist, such as Robinson, and Dames linked the Obama conversation–some of you might remember–that took place at Hyannis Port in 1960 when JFK, then running for president, met with Norman Mailer, according to Dames, “in order to rouse the discouraged liberal elites who were . . .

Cupple House, St. Louis University This is an article I wrote for my college alumni magazine at Saint Louis University about a writing professor of mine who also was the teacher of several other PCVs in the early years of the agency. This professor was the mentor of dozens of future poets and writers and shows, I hope, how one professor can influence and encourage students to write, whether they join the Peace Corps or not. • “To Burn With A Hard, Gemlike Flame” Let me tell you what it was like to be in the English Department in the ’50s during the Silent Generation, at the time of the Beat Poets, when Gas Light Square was in its infancy, and everyone was on the road. I came to Saint Louis University in 1955 because of the Writers’ Institute founded by Dr. James Cronin. Dr. Cronin was the first person to tell me . . .

Thanks to a “heads up” from Bill Preston (1977-80) I heard that Leonard Lopate ( WNYC All Things Considered) interviewed the curator of the current Hemingway Between the Wars exhibit at the Morgan yesterday, January 5, 2016. Declan Kiely is the Curator and Department Head of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum, he offered an inside look at the exhibit  which explores a vital period of creative development in Hemingway’s life between WWI and WWII, a period that influenced his seminal works. The exhibit includes rarely shown manuscripts, letters, photographs, drafts, typescripts of stories, first editions and artifacts. It runs through January 31. You can listen to the 16 minute interview. Here’s the link: http://www.wnyc.org/story/declan-kiely-discusses-hemingways-creative-explosion-during-interwar-period/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+%24%7 Blopate%7D+%28%24%7BLeonard+Lopate%7D%29&utm_content=%24%7Bfeed%7D

The sixth Poets & Writers Live event was held at the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s Mediatheque Theater on October 17, 2015 in Portland, Oregon. The editors of many of the area’s presses and literary magazines joined the editors of Poets & Writers Magazine to explore the art of writing and the business of independent publishing. One of the speakers was Tom Spanbauer (Kenya 1969-71), author of Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, In The City of Shy Hunters, Now Is the Hour, and, most recently, I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books, 2014) winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award. He presented a talk on Dangerous Writing, an innovative approach to writing that forms the basis of the workshop he has been teaching in his basement classroom in Portland for years. Dangerous Writing, Tom says, “is to go to parts of ourselves that we know exist but try to ignore–parts that are sad, . . .

At some point you’ll want to ask “someone” to read your novel while it is still in manuscript. This might be your partner or a friend who loves to read, or one of those strangers in your writing class. When that time comes, I want you to recall the exchange between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald when Hemingway asked F. Scott to read his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald did, and then wrote a letter to Ernie. This was in 1926. Fitzgerald suggested to Hemingway that he drop the first two chapters, characterizing the novel’s opening as “careless and ineffectual.” Fitzgerald then went on to write in his letter to Hemingway: “About this time, I can hear you say, ‘Jesus this guy thinks I’m lousy, & he can stick it up his ass for all I give a Gd Dm for his ‘criticism’. But remember this is . . .

Your Novel Needs a Structure You Need a Structure The hardest part about writing a novel is writing a novel. Now there’s a declarative sentence! But it’s so true. To write a novel you need a structure: a beginning and middle and end. Characters. Plot. Scenes. Events. But more importantly you need a frame for the length of your book on which you can hang your story: the action, characters, metaphors, plot twists, and drama. Think of your novel as a room you have to measure with a long industrial ruler, one of those big, fat ones carpenters carry and whip out of their pockets like an old fashioned six shooter. That’s your plan. Your focus. Your design. That is how you will tell your tale. You will measure the scenes and incidents, the drama and the dialogue and make sure everything fits. That’s your plan for writing your novel. . . .

I was reading recently that while less people are reading, books themselves are getting longer. James Finlayson at Vervesearch analyzed more than 2,500 bestsellers list and found that the average number of pages in a book has increased by 25 percent in the last 15 years. Books published today have on average about 80 pages more than they did in 1999. According to The Guardian “The first five years of Booker-winning novels average out at around 300 pages, but even taking into account Julian Barnes’s 2011 triumph with his 160-page novella The Sense of an Ending, the last five years of Booker laureates weigh in at an average of 520 pages. This year’s winner was brief only in name: Marlon James’s 700-page A Brief History of Seven Killings.”