High school is forever.

This one's primarily for the YA authors reading this: a New York Magazine piece that argues that ages 15-25 are the most important and most poignant of our lives:

Why You Truly Never Leave High School

Do you still feel connected to your adolescent self? If so, does it benefit your writing?

Bonus question: if you're friends with your high school classmates on Facebook, does that ongoing connection affect your sense or your memories of that part of your life?

Longform Friday.

This was just excellent.

No Evidence of Disease

Nonfiction writers: do you try to incorporate the element of surprise into your work? How do you get the reader invested in your story?

OPEN THREAD: Q&A

I'm in the mood to try something different, so here goes: have any random publishing-related questions you'd like me to (try to) answer? Ask in the comments, and I'll respond, either in the comments or in a future post!

Here's one from Jenny in the comments from a couple weeks back to get us started:

What the heck does it mean when you see a romance that says, "first time in print?" Like, did it have a life as a movie or something before? I've ALWAYS been confused about that. Unless it's meant to differentiate from a re-release of a backlist title? But how often does that happen?

I typically see "first time in print" on the covers of books from the big names in the romance industry: Madeline Hunter, Nora Roberts, Debbie Macomber, and so on. What do all of these have in common? For one thing, they've been publishing for a while-- long enough that there's a good chance that their earlier works (say, with Harlequin series) are out-of-print.

Every publishing contract has, or should have, language that defines when a book is deemed officially out-of-print, but what's considered OOP varies from publisher to publisher. Moreover, the onus is typically on the author to ask for the rights to be reverted, and even if the author sends the requisite letter to the publisher, the publisher usually has six months to get the book back into print before they have to grant the reversion. So the publisher might re-publish the book to hang on to the rights, or they might let the author have the rights back so she can self-publish the work, or relicense it to another publisher if she chooses.

All this to say, yes, re-releases of backlist titles happen pretty frequently, especially for the "household names" of the romance genre. The "first time in print" is a way to flag to that author's fans that yes, this is indeed a new book you hold in your hands (or are preparing to download to your e-reader).


What else do you want to know?

Writing tips from Pamela Ribon

I especially like #4:

Top 5 Writing Tips from Pamela Ribon

How do you keep yourself from comparing your achievements to those of other writers?

Decoding query rejections.

Rachelle Gardner, as usual, has a lot of smart insights on what your query rejection might mean:

Decoding Query Rejections

I can concur with her anecdote about some queriers writing back to argue with a rejection, by the way. I've never understood why some people do this; trying to pick a fight with me is a poor way of demonstrating what a great working relationship we're likely to have.

Query etiquette wise, here's a bit of free advice I'm not sure I've given in this space before: please, please, please do not use your author website (the one linked in your query letter, or to your Google Plus account, if you use it) to blog about the query process. I tend not to look at queriers' sites unless I'm liking the pages you sent with the query, but if I see that you've been querying hundreds of agents for months, and you have a long post from a few weeks back about how your dream agent said no and you're on to Plan B, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It also doesn't strike me as terribly professional; if you get in an argument with your publisher over the cover design, are you going to document that on the blog, too?

I know we live in a confessional age, but I think there are things you just don't want a permanent record of. Once it's on the Internet, it's no longer private-- and you can't take it back.

Have you Googled yourself recently? Do you like what you see?

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Did you all already know about this and you didn't tell me?

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

(Happy 200th anniversary, Pride and Prejudice... last week)

Longform Friday

There's something incredibly moving about this piece-- an Esquire article from fall 2012 about Teller, the magician.

The Honor System