Picking Winners

 

In Publishing News this week,

 

The Guardian reported that there was no magic fairy that would help fund Literary Festivals in the UK. Here in NZ we are also facing this fact head on. There is no money. With austere government retrenching across the board the arts are seen as nice to have if we can afford it, but we can’t. The majority of our arts and science funding comes from profits made from government lotteries. The wish to win the big one is the poor man’s dream and the poor artists and scientists dream as well. Wouldn’t it be lovely if the jackpot could be arts funding for ten years or new research labs. The winner could have their name on the trust fund to administer it. Not bad for a $10 lucky dip ticket.

The UK Creators Rights Alliance is gathering steam. The alliance claims to represent more than 500,000 creatives who don’t want their work used by AI companies. There are some big organisations here, but will they see any traction? This could be a last rear-guard effort to man the barricades. 

 

Mark Williams lives and works in Africa. He explains what it is like to watch technology leaps in Africa that other countries had to live through. Remember dial up? Africa went straight to 5G. Is AI going to be the same?

 

Staying with AI- Don’t believe that it is reliable. Randy Ingermanson (Snowflake guy) recently tried using Chat GPT to do some writing for him and discovered that every quote was made up by the AI bot. What to do?

 

Publishing Perspectives reports that on one of the hottest days in the UK the Publishing Association’s sustainability pledge reached 200 company signatories. Publishing without waste, it just makes sense.

 

Story Empire has an interesting post on going to tertiary research institutions to get reliable information. – This is not just universities but also archives and museums. 

 

Dan Holloway of The Alliance of Independent Authors ( Alli) reports on Substack expanding its reach and making it easy for anyone to have a newsletter.

Alli are rejigging their podcasts, if you are a regular listener, and they have just published a super in-depth article on Marketing Strategies.

 

The Insecure Writers Support Group (fantastic group) have a great article on putting together short story collections.

Jeff Goins has an article on 10 steps to writing a book.

 

Katie Weiland has the next installment of her structure series. This is a great resource and well worth following along for some great craft teaching.

 

In The Craft Section,

The art of the outline- James Scott Bell - Bookmark

Story Structure as a fractal- September Fawkes- Bookmark

Use your theme to trim content- Suzi Vadori- Bookmark

7 tips for opening in media res- K M Weiland

5 mistakes writers make in fantasy stories- Lucy Hay

 

In The Marketing Section,

Amazon A+ content- Sandra Beckwith- Bookmark

What does your marketing data say- In depth teaching on data!

Amazon book description generator- Dave Chesson – Bookmark

15 Book promo ideas – Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

Audiobook marketing using virtual voices- Penny Sansevieri

 

To Finish

Last night I attended the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. It was great to celebrate with this very supportive community the fabulous books published in the last year. A striking feature was the emphasis of the winners in telling our indigenous stories. Out of seven major categories, five were won by books with indigenous main themes. The evening was enlivened by speeches entirely in Maori with many in the audience able to understand the main themes. For many years we read and copied stories that had an American or British style, to tell us who we are. This century I think we can say the national book awards finally reflect us - a pacific island nation with our own unique voice and heritage. It’s been a long time coming and its fabulous to see.

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

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Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash