Thursday, May 04, 2006

Lulu vs. Blurb

Yet another tale of two PODs. This time it's the Washington Post doing the legwork.

Check it out.

A tale of two PODs (sort of)

In response to my blog entry a few days ago regarding the similarity of the cover of Will Clarke's DON'T ABUSE THE MUSE to the cover of Collective Soul's YOUTH compact disc, I received some insider info from Todd C. Noker.

Todd, as you faithful readers already know, is the author of the smoking
RATED F, which was a Needle Award finalist this year.

What you may not know, however, is that Todd's day job is being a DJ and Program Director for alternative rock station KXRK out in Salt Lake City, Utah (yes, people rock out in Utah.) Todd says:

The Youth album was put out on a small, independent label. After several successful years with Atlantic/WEA (which was part of the Warner, Elektra, Atlantic label conglomerate) they left the big label for an indie. This gave the band a much bigger piece of the royalties from album sales. For them, it was a gamble. They were a well-known band and figured they could cut the major label out of the deal and sort of do things on their own. The band recorded the album on their own before they put it out on El Music Group. They hired a team of independent promoters to work the record to radio stations and ended up having some good success with it. My radio station, KXRK, ended up not really playing anything from that album because it was more of a Hot AC (young adult contemporary) sound. But they did have a couple of respectable hits in the pop and mainstream rock formats and sold plenty of copies.

See? When rock stars go independent, they're cool. When writers do the same? You know the answer.


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Stay tuned Monday when I unearth some serious treasure!

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Losses cut.

Good deal. Now we can move on to the next fiasco.

This story keeps getting weirder. Who is Alloy and why on earth are respected folks at Little, Brown and William Morris and who knows where else depending on these people to develop books? Has literature dropped to the level of a SITCOM pilot?

Truth is stranger than fiction--and much stranger than plagiarized fiction.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Attention Little, Brown: Time to cut your losses.

Kaavya Viswanathan is either the world's most egregious plagiarizer (don't laugh; it's a real word) or she really is ingesting other novels.

She is the subject of yet another plagiarism claim. This time, the text was pulled from a Sophie Kinsella novel.

There is no hope for OPAL whatsoever. Little, Brown needs to yank this thing from the shelves before it gets worse--and before the world of literature gets an even worse rap than it already has. Want more people to turn off the TV and start reading again? This isn't the shortcut to take.

Perhaps more disturbing is this: You read time and time again of how some group of frustrated writers submits TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD or THE GRAPES OF WRATH to agents and editors, only to have it rejected for various reasons. So how unnerving is it that a publisher paid a half million for previously released chick lit novels?

Monday, May 01, 2006

My apologies, etc.

My email has gotten out of control. Seriously.

I try to cull through the garbage but I am getting so many submissions and requests that it is hard to keep up--and, alas, I haven't.

For the most part, I am many months out on submissions and I am trying to catch up but it has been challenging. If you have submitted your book--or even queried--in the last few months (say, since late February) the odds are I have not gotten to your email. I cannot respond to every query so if I am interested you will hear from me. Eventually.

And I don't even glance at my spam folder. So if your book happens to be about mortgage rates or penis size or winning the lottery, you might not want to put it in the subject line.

Also, I greatly appreciate all the folks who said they bought the Needle winners (their books, that is.)

Now back to culling.