John Wiley & Sons came up bupkis in the Supreme Court of the Unites States in their Copyright infringement case against a Cornell student who was reselling Wiley textbooks published in Thailand in the USA at a highly discounted rate. One would think that ruling is terrible for textbooks and for authors — the opposite is true.
Getting your writing published in book form has long been the penultimate goal of authors across the world. I’ve made my fair share of money in the publishing marketplace and one thing I can confirm is how much the industry has changed over the last 20 years.
Fifteen years or so ago, you could easily get a $15,000.00USD book royalty advance from a major computer book publisher. You knew going into the job that, at the end of 90 days, you’d be fifteen large richer. It was a great way to earn a quick living. Once you had a book or two, the major computer magazine publishers would come calling, and you could write a 10,000 word essay and make $5,000.00USD for that weekend effort. It was a rich and rewarding life, but then the chain came off the sprocket with the rise of the interwebs, the internets, the web. Many book publishers were consolidated with other houses, or entirely demolished in bankruptcy, and all the great computer magazines are as dead now as the tree pulp they were printed on.
Today, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Boles Books Tribute to Howard Stein, Volume 1 (1948-2013) from Boles Books Writing & Publishing and published on Amazon Kindle Direct!
Playwright Mac Wellman has an interesting idea: Give CUNY students a tuition-free Master of Fine Arts degree to allow them to study the Arts without going deep into debt. Mac wants these students to learn how they construct the world so they can understand their place in its spinning.
Every year during the month of November, I attempt to complete the National Novel Writing Month challenge and every year at a certain point in time it becomes clear to me that I will have no way of completing the challenge. This year has been particularly brutal to me in that it is only the 11th of the month and I am aware that, short of a complete writing miracle, or being temporarily stranded on a desert island with nothing but a word processor and necessary nourishment, I will not come even close to completing the challenge.
I am late to the Readability party, but now that I have a seat at the table, I’m delighted to report I love the whole idea and driving purpose behind the product. As a fan of Instapaper, I was surprised to see Readability so readily adopted by major RSS feed readers like Reeder. I wondered what that red chair icon meant, and I wanted to know how Readability differed from Instapaper.
It is already five days into National Novel Writing Month and I don’t have much to show for it. Another National Novel Writing Month “competition” has arrived and I am, once again, most likely not going to have fifty thousand words written by the end of the month. In all likelihood, I will abandon the novel I started planning a few months ago but only really decided upon a few days ago, and I will not look back upon the text until next year, when I wonder what I have been doing for the last eight years.
American historian Howard Zinn died in January at the age of 87 — but Zinn will live forever in the Panopticonic infamy of a 423-page FBI dossier.
There is no greater moment of trepidation for a Playwright — or any author, really — when you’re dealing with a Director or an editor who replies — “I’ll know it when I see it” — in response to your asking for clarification on a change they want made.
In thinking about Eric Bentley as he stretches beyond his 93rd birthday, we are torn between the genius of his writing and his coldness as a man. Will the writing endure? Or will the chilly memory frost the evergreen talent?
When you finish writing a script, it is never really done. There will always be changes and how you handle the construction of those changes will define your life as an author in the center of the creative core.
I had great love and admiration for composer Cy Coleman. We met on “The Will Rogers Follies” and we stayed in touch after that show was over until his untimely death from at massive heart attack in 2004 at the too-young age of 75.
The business of writing is not mystical or special. Writing is tough and thankless work and I don’t know a working writer who has time to stop to attend a writer’s group because the author is either in the middle of a deadline or is collapsing after just hitting a drop-dead date.
We currently have 6,000 languages in active use across the world; by 2050 we will have lost half of them. Peter K. Austin, in — One Thousand Languages — takes us on a multicultural tour of the most interesting remaining languages.
