writer (12 books and counting), editor, college professor, and Democratic Town Committee member in New England. Most recent books are fantasy novels The Green Lion and The Golden Thorns (www.swordsmith.com and www.wildsidegame.com).
Since it's Connecticut Week here on DKos, and I'm a DTC member in the heart of Lamont country, I thought I would introduce one of the other new candidates who's very much a part of the Democratic resurgance in the Quiet Corner of northeast Connecticut - Sherri Vogt. Running against entrenched Republican Assemblyman "Silent Mike" Alberts, Vogt is an Army veteran, a PTO mom, a former adult student who ended up graduating with honors, and exactly the kind of passionate, don't-you-dare-screw-with-my-kids'-futures Democrat that we need to be electing at all levels to get rid of the entrenched culture of privilege in Hartford as well as Washington. And now, Sherri Vogt is also a Kossack. Sherri will be liveblogging below from 10:00-noon, and dropping by after to answer additional comments.
Publishing Lists
The publishing world is crowded with "-list" terms: Backlist, frontlist, midlist, etc. All of them relate to how books are bought and sold, and understanding how those lists work can make a big difference in selling your own book to a publisher, and marketing it once it's sold. Unfortunately, that means this episode is a bit more technical than last chapter's Leaving Laura. (Yes, this is an incremental step toward the "how to find an agent" segment, which will be appearing Monday around noon.)
Submitting a Manuscript
There have been a whole bunch of requests for an entry in this series covering the basics of how to submit a manuscript to a publisher. So this is going to be a long but fairly general nuts-and-bolts kind of introductory segment, with the more detailed nuances of book proposal writing, finding market reports, and such left for later segments. Most of what I talk about here is true for submitting both books to publishers and stories to magazines, and it's similar to what you'll be submitting to a prospective literary agent.
Book Packagers
As a former book packager myself, and an editor for the late NYC book packager Byron Preiss before that (about whom author Alan Rodgers once said, in perhaps a slight exaggeration, "When you shake hands with Byron, you have to count your fingers afterward), I thought I would talk a bit about this low-profile side of publishing, which is responsible for producing some huge best-sellers, but is also notorious for shady dealings.
Literary Conventions (With an Emphasis on SF Conventions)
By request, I'm going to use tonight's (very long) segment to talk about literary conventions. As a writer and editor, I'm less interested in the highbrow (and high-priced) literary conferences aimed at new writers, since I think your chances of learning your way around the field at them are significantly worse than the genre conferences. And I'm very skeptical of for-profit conventions.
If you missed the previous episode ("Why bad things happen to good books") you can find it here.
Yes, publishing is a swamp. Most of this series will be devoted to explaining how cattails can be yummy and the ways that marshgrass is sometines kind of sweet, but I wanted to spend a little bit of time exploring the muckier part of the swamp first, in the interest of y'all not drowning. There is some solid ground in among the mud, but certain areas of publishing, especially vanity publishing and self-publishing, are especially prone to scams. Another area where scams are common is in fake literary agents, who prey on new writers' naivete about how publishing works.
Now that we're finally starting to reclaim the best-seller lists from the likes of Ann Coulter, and many bloggers are turning their thoughts to writing books, I thought it might be helpful to do a series on how the publishing process works, why some books sell and others don't, and how to go about finishing your book, finding an agent, and getting published. I'll also touch on self-publishing and avoiding scams, as well as any other publishing-related questions people would like answered.
In light of your closure vote today, I will be calling to arrange a meeting with Ned Lamont to see about supporting his primary challenge to you, and urging my fellow members of the Democratic Town Committee in ---- (as well as all the Democrats I work in my capacity as a professor and the author of nine books) to do likewise.
I am deeply disappointed in your failure to stand up to the erosion of our system of checks and balances, the erosion of our privacy rights--indeed the erosion of the Fourth Amendment itself.
