Why Are So Many Wannabe Screenwriters Getting Scammed?
hollywoodreporter.com – Wednesday August 1, 2018
From "pitch fests" to online script coaches, an entire cottage industry has sprung up to help aspiring scribes crack the movie business, and while some offerings are legit, many are schemes designed to prey on the Hollywood dreams of gullible strivers.
A few weeks after Manny Fonseca arrived in Los Angeles in the early part of this decade, having left his native Michigan with the hope of becoming a Hollywood writer or executive, the then 30-year-old was at a party when a producer asked if he’d “like to make a hundred bucks.” Sure, he replied. What would he have to do?
The answer was to show up the next day at a “pitch fest,” one of dozens of such gatherings each year in which hopefuls pay hundreds of dollars to serve up their story ideas to agents and executives who, in theory, will buy them if they’re good. Fonseca would be there as one of the buyers, which struck him as strange — not only was he not an executive, he didn’t even have a proper job: he had been interning with producers Arnold Kopelson and Irwin Winkler.
Advice For Entrepreneurs Looking To Launch An Online Magazine
forbes.com – Tuesday July 31, 2018
With so many companies and individuals creating blogs on almost every topic under the sun, it can be difficult to grab your audience’s attention. However, if you consider yourself an expert on a particular subject, whether it’s gardening or real estate, you might be well-placed to launch an online magazine.
An online magazine is a digital publication on a specific subject or interest that can generate revenue and provide significant archival content. Even if there are already other magazines on the subject, you might be able to offer something uniquely valuable to your niche that establishes you as a thought leader in your field.
Judith Appelbaum, a Guide for Would-Be Authors, Dies at 78
nytimes.com – Monday July 30, 2018
Judith Appelbaum, whose almost 60-year career in book publishing became a crusade to make the industry better — for writers, publishers and readers — died on Wednesday at her home in Bedford, N.Y. She was 78.
Alan Appelbaum, her husband of 57 years, said the cause was ovarian cancer.
Ms. Appelbaum held numerous jobs in the book publishing industry. During the early 1980s she was managing editor of Publishers Weekly and wrote the “Paperback Talk” column for The New York Times Book Review. But her best-remembered and most influential project may have been the 1978 book “How to Get Happily Published: A Complete and Candid Guide,” which she wrote with Nancy Evans.
How the ‘brainy’ book became a publishing phenomenon
theguardian.com – Sunday July 29, 2018
This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing.
The book is Sapiens, by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, published in the UK in September 2014. It’s a recondite work of evolutionary history charting the development of humankind through a scholarly examination of our ability to cooperate as a species. Sapiens sold well on publication, particularly when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2015. What’s remarkable about it, though, is that it’s still selling in vast numbers. In its first two and a half years of life, Sapiens sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK. Since 2017, when Harari published Homo Deus, his follow-up, Sapienshas sold a further half million copies, establishing itself firmly at the top of the bestseller lists (and convincingly outselling its sequel). Sapiens has become a publishing phenomenon and its wild success is symptomatic of a broader trend in our book-buying habits: a surge in the popularity of intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old.
Marjacq to push further into the heart of the action in its 45th year
thebookseller.com – Sunday July 29, 2018
Despite concerns about the "Spotification of literature" and the unknowns of Brexit, Marjacq’s director Guy Herbert is in an upbeat mood as he welcomes me to the central London office of the boutique literary agency, which turns 45 this year.
What follows is a more chaotic interview than the average company profile for The Bookseller, as his six-agent team piles into the small meeting space along with their leader. We are forced to conduct the interview in two stages as there are not enough chairs to fit all the staff in, but the conversation that follows is peppered with the words "collegiate" and "collaborative", and it is clear that these phrases are not merely paying lip service.
Inspiration or plagiarism? Writing hackles raised in Boston dispute
bostonglobe.com – Friday July 27, 2018
Good artists copy, but great artists steal, or so the old saying goes. But the truth may be far more complicated, as shown by a recent case of alleged plagiarism that rattled through Boston’s literary scene.
Accusations arose in June that a small section of a piece of short fiction chosen by the Boston Book Festival for its annual One City One Story program contained material lifted from another, real-life source. The group is planning to distribute now slightly modified copies of the work for free starting in late August.
The story, “The Kindest,” by Boston writer Sonya Larson, involves a kidney donation and was published last year in American Short Fiction to praise and acclaim. The objections, raised by a former friend of Larson who said the writer had lifted material from her Facebook post, eventually triggered legal and ethical inquiries, as well as questions of when and how it is acceptable for the stuff of real life — someone else’s life in particular — to be transformed into art.
This Piece Of Writing Advice From 'Ron Carlson Writes A Story' Transformed My Creative Process For The Better
bustle.com – Friday July 27, 2018
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a writer in some capacity or another. Growing up, I spent all the free time I had working on angsty teenage love poems and cringe-worthy romance stories that were in reality just thinly veiled fantasies about whoever I had a crush on that week. Back then, the words flowed out of me almost seamlessly, but as I got older, I found that writing — and I mean really writing, actually working on a novel — is a lot more difficult than it seemed a decade ago when I still believed every idea I had was pure gold and every word I put on paper was absolutely genius. It had a lot to do with my confidence, or a lack thereof and my fear of creating something terrible, embarrassing, or just plain boring. For years, I found myself starting a project with the highest of hopes, only to abandon it after a few hundred words, convinced there was no way that what I was writing was could ever become an actual work of literary art. That is, until I picked up a slim writing guide that held within its pages advice from author Ron Carlson that transformed my writing process for the better.
No, you probably don’t have a book in you
theoutline.com – Friday July 27, 2018
Has anyone ever said you should write a book? Maybe extraordinary things have happened to you, and they say you should write a memoir. Or you have an extremely vivid imagination, and they say you should write a novel. Maybe your kids are endlessly entertained at bedtime, and they say you should write a children’s book. Perhaps you just know how everything should be and imagine your essay collection will set the world straight.
Everyone has a book in them, right?
I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them.
A Published Author Told Me To Stop Writing Fan Fiction — But The Lunar Chronicles Author Marissa Meyer Disagrees
bustle.com – Wednesday July 25, 2018
"If you ever wanted to be a published author, you need to stop writing fan fiction immediately."
I blinked, wondering how I'd gotten from standing in line for a snorkel at the beach to having my entire geeky world upended in one sentence. Several minutes earlier I'd struck up a conversation with the woman in front of me, who turned out to be a published author. It was January of 2016, so I was about 15,000 words deep into what would eventually become a monstrous, novel-length fan fiction sequel to The Force Awakens, and was so hopped up on having someone to talk writing with that I told her as much.
Cue the existential crisis.
2 Big Book Writing Myths That Will Keep You From Achieving Big Profits
entrepreneur.com – Wednesday July 25, 2018
When my first book was published, I thought it would be an overnight success based purely on the topic and the fact that I knew the world needed it. My genius marketingplan was to simply publish it. If it exists on the internet, people will find it, right?
As you can imagine, that didn't work. It's a bit like showing up to a party, not knowing anyone, trying to make a grand entrance and having zero people pay attention. In fact, it was a lot like that. Hardly anyone blinked an eye or turned their head when my book became available.
Undeterred, I decided that the ticket to my success was that coveted Amazonbestseller ribbon. That will solve all my problems, I thought.
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