October 2009
“Dimitri and I are half-naked when the woman shows up with the dogs. He is sitting up and I am astride him, my dress around my waist. What we had thought to be a secluded park looking out on an all-but-abandoned pond is actually someone’s backyard.”
—Sharon Pomerantz, “Ghost Knife”
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Here, though, is one simple suggestion for how self-published authors can boost their brand: Stop calling yourself a self-published author. You are an independent author, and you wrote an independently published book, not a self-published book. After all, it’s not as if you chopped down the trees that produced the paper or that you’re churning out copies in your garage, next to your brewery.
More importantly, independence is one of the strongest branding concepts for Americans. An independent contractor or consultant sounds more glamorous than a self-employed freelancer. And indie musicians and film-makers wouldn’t sound quite so hip if they called themselves “self-recorded rockers” or “self-financed film-makers.”
” —Going “Indie”
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“i think i usually make new blogs because i feel bored, anxious, or inspired. i ‘own’ a lot of blogs right now. i am not ‘using’ most of the blogs i own. some of the blogs i own are being used for ‘experimental’ purposes, some are being reserved for future use, some are being used for specific purposes, some are undeveloped ideas which may or may not develop.”
I thought that that was a really nice way to think about blogging. As if each one were a fresh slate for something new you were thinking about. I think some people spend too much time on one project or another hoping to be consistent, but things got boring a while ago and your readers can sense it. If instead we think of blogging as simply spouting our undeveloped ideas and hoping they flourish (but not worrying about whether they do), then maybe we would be better off.
” —Oh Susana
Play
“For many writers, the world of publishing is fraught with so much uncertainty and anxiety that it can be helpful to take a deep breath and remember that, at the end of the day, we are all working in the service of the same simple and enduring thing: dreams. The writer sits in a room with a piece of paper and tries to spin one that is, in John Gardner’s phrase, vivid and continuous. The agent sorts through the many dreams that are submitted to her in search of the most captivating. The editor does the same thing and then, if he’s any good, tries everything he can think of to bring that dream to the widest possible audience.”
—A Q&A With Editor Jonathan Karp
“Go into the Young Adult section of the bookstore and you’ll be bombarded by any number of titles centering on the fashion world (Catwalk, Airhead, Violet on the Runway), as well as characters that are notorious fashionistas (Clique, Poseur, and of course It Girl and Gossip Girl). The super-hip authors name-drop brands, describe clothes in painstaking detail, and lo, a trend is born.”
—From Fiction to Fashion Statement
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Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. I’ve always been shy about being critical of others’ choices because I hate when people do that to me. I’m often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., “What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what’ll you eat?”).
I’ve also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else — a historically dangerous stance (I’m often reminded that “Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know”). But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong.
” —Natalie Portman on vegetarianism
“Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.”
—Gladwell, “Late Bloomers”
