The Writing Center

I just came across a hiliarious blog about unnecessary quotation marks on signs and other printed matter. In a way, I admire it (someone else gets as irritated as I do by bad punctuation!), and on the other hand, it’s a little frightening (no one should care this much about bad punctuation, including me).

But it’s pretty funny … and it makes clear that the owners of these signs should be concerned about more than bad punctuation. Does anyone really want to eat at a restaurant whose sign reads Open Upstairs for “Lunch” and “Dinner”? And who’s going to take seriously a sign that reads The Use, Possession and Sale of Drugs in Mexico Is Prohibited by “Law”?

If in the course of your lives you see any signs that warrant ridicule on this blog, you can photograph them and make submissions of your own. (Just in case reading the blog alone isn’t enough procrastination for us writers.)

For all you Anglophile wordsmiths out there, check out this Reuters arcticle about the disappearance of hyphens from 16,000 words in the new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

The editor of the Shorter OED, Angus Stevenson, says that the hyphen has become “messy looking” and “old-fashioned” — but actually, looks played a rather small role; the staff omitted said hyphens only after “exhaustive research.” Most hyphens were dropped from compound nouns, though Stevenson does concede that they found many instances in which hyphens are still necessary.

Formerly hyphenated words were either split into two or combined into one (in most cases, what most American writers and editors are already used to). A few examples:

fig-leaf = fig leaf

ice-cream = ice cream

test-tube = test tube

water-bed = water bed

bumble-bee = bumblebee

cry-baby = crybaby

low-life = lowlife

Don’t forget to check out this week’s San Diego Reader, whose cover features Tori Malcangio’s award-winning essay “Jesus of Carmel Mountain Ranch.”

Tori’s piece took second place in the Reader’s contest on San Diego neighborhoods and is on newsstands now. And in case you miss the print version, you can read her story here.

An article in today’s Wall St. Journal (subscription required) tells an interesting story about the memoir Eat, Pray, Love and the efforts that went into creating what some might view as good luck. Instead, the book becoming a bestseller was “a series of calculated moves [in which] executives worked to interpret sales patterns and create a marketing blitz to attract individual readers as well as book clubs” — a new strategy among publishers to turn mid-list books into bestsellers.

Not every writer will be as fortunate as Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. The article notes that for every 15 to 20 trade paperback titles Penguin publishes, it puts hefty marketing and sales efforts into only one or two. And as Penguin publisher Kathryn Court tells the WSJ, the author’s personality plays a role: “When the writer of a book is attractive, generous, and funny, booksellers end up rooting for her.”

It also helps that Gilbert had a following from her other books, that hardcover sales were stronger than expected — and that her memoir appeals to women, who buy 60% to 70% of books in the U.S.

Rest assured that no backlist is necessary (Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner, had modest hardcover sales, then went on to become a bestseller in paperback; his second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was a bestseller in hardcover). Most important is to have a good story — and while understanding how the publishing industry works may not make you one of these lucky few, it certainly won’t hurt.

Today’s San Diego Union-Tribune features a story about the perils of self-publishing, this time focusing on a local publisher, Ed Johnson, whose second company has just collapsed after taking thousands of dollars from hopeful writers.

This story offers some good insight into vanity presses, toward which many writers are increasingly turning in their efforts to get published. While Johnson told the U-T that he simply went out of business, the article quotes a former employee of Johnson’s company, who said that to Johnson, the authors were “just a source of income,” and that she was instructed to tell authors who called that he was “on the other side of the building” to make it seem as if he ran a large publishing business. In reality, the “publishing house” was a one-room office in a converted motel.

Unfortunately, the stories of these would-be authors are not unusual: In these cases, they paid from $2,500 to $5,700 and never received the books they envisioned, let alone the publicity and marketing they expected. One customer did receive one copy of a “finished book” — in a spiral binder. Most received nothing at all.

The article quotes Victoria Strauss of the excellent resource Writer Beware, which aims to educate writers about the “enormous shadow industry of scammers and amateurs who prey on aspiring writers, who divert people from the real publishing industry into this shadow world of vanity publishing and fee-charging agents.”

This article is a must-read for any writer thinking about self-publishing, but writers should also keep in mind that self-publishing doesn’t have to be the nightmare that this story portrays. Publishing one’s own book can be a good choice for those with a platform and marketing savvy, those who can afford the investment, and those who realize that self-publishing is simply a matter of printing. Writers who want editing, design, publicity, distribution, and book reviews (not to mention an advance and royalties) need to find an agent and go the traditional route.

While there’s no replacing Miss Snark, Denver literary agent Kristin Nelson has a cool blog. Her entry for September 7 is especially good, as she discusses two query letters that captured her attention, ultimately resulting in not only representation but book deals — and not only book deals but book deals at auction. Like Miss Snark, Kristin also links to other blogging agents … great resources for writers, offering much-needed insight into the publishing world.

Many writers (at least, before they are published) dream of book tours in which they host readings to standing-room audiences in cities across the country … which, unfortunately, is rarely the case. More and more, writers have to find their own innovative ways (and open their own wallets) to promote their books.

Today’s New York Times features a piece on book tours via blogs — one of the best (and most economical) ways for an author to get out there and “talk” to his or her audience.

If it doesn’t sound as fun as a real, live book tour, think of the advantages: no travel time or expenses; no feelings of rejection when no one shows up for your reading (which, sadly, happens all too often); and the possibility of reaching a larger and broader audience than could fit into the reading rooms of most bookstores. Add this to “the dirty little secret of real-life author tours” that Powell’s Books’ Dave Weich confessed to the Times: “most of the people who go to events don’t buy books” — and virtual book tours are looking more like reality all the time.