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WPNews, January 2025
The Let’s Get to Work Issue
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From Kathleen Kaiser, President
Do you like the stories in this newsletter? If you do, please consider joining WPN this year. Besides the many discounts that membership offers, you help support the work of this all-volunteer organization.
We are looking for members to join some of our committees to extend our education and resources to a broader audience of writers and small publishers.
This year marks the completion of the merger of IWOSC and PALA into WPN. We have a full roster of education and informative workshops, webinars, panel discussions, and more lined up to help you on your publishing journey. Ads throughout this email announce January's offerings, and the Calendar will tell you about the upcoming programs for the next three months.
We're here to help. Please attend those programs that appeal to your current and future needs. If there are any topics you would like to see, don't hesitate to contact me at kathleen@writersandpublishersnetwork.com.
Happy New Year!
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From Sandra Murphy, Editor
If you’re suffering from post-holiday letdown and it persists for more than a short time, check out this month’s article about artists and depression by Eric Schumacher. Artists and writers often work alone, adding to the feeling of sadness. You are not alone. Find ways to connect. Here’s a suggestion:
https://www.facebook.com/writersandpublishersnetwork/
Drop by, make friends, start a discussion, ask questions.
With all the stress of the election and more, set aside time to visit your imaginary friends, also known as characters in the stories you have to tell. Their worlds may be more or less stressful than your own, but it’s always good to visit them, at least for a few minutes a day.
Let’s make 2025 a memorable year—for good reasons.
Sandy, Editor, editor@writersandpublishersnetwork.com
If you’d like to write a guest post for the newsletter, send an email to editor@writersandpublishersnetwork.com
with ideas for articles. Don’t send the full article—we want to avoid duplicates.
If you are not a member yet, join at www.writersandpublishers.com.
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Ask the Book Doctor: About Literary Agents by Bobbie Christmas
Q: Do I really need a literary agent if I want to sell my book to a publisher?
A: The answer depends on your manuscript. Some publishers—it seems mostly smaller publishers of nonfiction—accept submissions directly without the need of an agent. Most bigger publishers and publishers of fiction accept submissions only through agents. Their logic is that the agents do the hard upfront work of reading through hundreds of submissions and picking only the best to submit to the publisher.
Research the publishers you’re interested in and see if they accept unagented submissions. If they don’t, then yes, you need to find an agent, and no one claims that the process of finding an agent is easy.
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The Publishing Game by Jay Hartman
Good grief, is it really another new year already? Where does the time go? It seems as if we were just setting up our plan of attack for the year and here we are again needing more new goals.
Except, the landscape has changed quite a bit from last year at this time. After all, a lot happens over the course of twelve months. Readers’ tastes change, markets open and close, beloved authors pass, and new authors gain acclaim. If you’re going to write as a business and try to make a living from it, you need to understand what’s going on in the publishing landscape and what this might mean for you. As January is a time people set goals for the year, I decided to look at items people have reported through recent surveys as the things they’re most concerned about in the publishing industry moving forward. Some are legitimate concerns, while some are blown a bit out of proportion. The goal here is to determine how many you need to worry about and how many you can disregard to focus on other issues.
THE DEATH OF SOCIAL MEDIA
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This is the first Marketing Tips and Tools column from WPN’s President
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Timeline for Your Book Launch by Kathleen Kaiser
Are you launching a book this year?
If yes, it's time to begin your marketing. You read this correctly: a
full year out to make an impact when the book releases. Few things, but
a simple plan. Here are my steps to marketing a book that leads to
success.
One Year Out…
First, create a budget to spread the money over the entire year. And
be realistic. If you're launching your first book, you must spend more
than an established author with multiple titles. Next, you have to
create a website, along with your author's Facebook and Instagram page,
not your personal profile page. These are public pages so the world can
find you. If you like to make videos, get a TikTokBooks page. Post
something twice a month to start. For the website, buy your name or
YourNameAuthor.com. I prefer GoDaddy as they are inexpensive and easy to
contact.
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Coloring Outside the Lines: Depression, the Value of Art, the Responsibility of the Artist to Society, and the Responsibility of Society to the Artist
by Eric Schumacher, reprinted with permission, Flapper Press.com
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I’ve had several conversations with fellow artists lately who have expressed they were becoming depressed. They wondered if there was value to their lives, if anyone cared. This has been a conversation with other artists with increasing frequency over the past year.
So first off, I’m writing this article to tell all my fellow artists that it’s not just you. If you are depressed and questioning your own value, you are not alone.
I understand where folks are coming from. We want to feel valued, and we want what we do to have meaning. Our work is the deepest expression of ourselves, and it is meant to be seen. We hope our work will be valued by others but understand the recognition and financial success that can come with it is often elusive or unstable.
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Are Editors Professionals?
by Arthur Vidro
Back in my newspaper days, we often worked late to complete an issue before it got shipped (by car) to the printer. We didn’t receive overtime. The reason, I was told, was because we were professionals. A full-time professional gets paid a flat rate per week or year, and whatever needs to be done, he or she does. If we put in a ton of extra time, we could take some “comp time” off in return. But not extra pay.
I was happy with the set-up, happy to consider myself a “professional.”
In today’s world, popular websites for finding freelance help treat editors as if they were fast-food workers. I’m grateful instead for the Editorial Freelancers Association website and perhaps one or two others, where editors are vetted, pay dues, and treated as the pros they are. If you seek a quality editor, the EFA is a good place to start.
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Arthur Vidro is a freelance editor/proofreader/writer. He may be reached at vidro@myfairpoint.net. This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Calliope on the Web, whose ISSN is 2691-1388.
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It’s Harder to Write Short than Long, but Well Worth It. by Linda Kay Hardie
We’ve all heard this quote and its variations: “I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” It’s from Blaise Pascal, seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher. It’s also been said by Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and others, but Pascal was first.
You may have found this when writing social media posts. If you’re in a hurry, isn’t your post longer than if you have time to think through what you’re trying to get across? Or perhaps you send off a quick post, only to find everyone misunderstood what you meant? To write something clear and short, you need to take the time to think through what you want to communicate.
It works for stories too. Many writers start out with short stories, especially flash fiction, thinking they’re easy because they’re shorter. Shorter only makes them harder. There’s no room for error. No time to wander around to smell the roses.
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Linda Kay Hardie writes horror, crime, and SF/fantasy stories, as well as poetry, essays (often about cats but sometimes about baseball), and fiction for children. She also writes recipes, and won a trophy in 2002 for best rib rub in the amateur division of the Best in the West Rib Cook-off in Sparks, Nevada. Linda’s writing has won awards dating back to a fifth-grade essay on fire safety, and in 2024 for her short story “Grenade Blows Up.” In 2022, she was honored with the Sierra Arts Foundation’s Literary Arts Award for fiction. Linda makes a living as a freelance writer and as staff working for Abyssinian cats. See her anthologies and children’s picture book at https://www.amazon.com/author/lindakayhardie.
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| Member Success |
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If you have a book coming out, won a prize, or are speaking at an event, please alert Sandy Murphy newsletter@writersandpublishersnetwork.com/
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| Patricia Fry is one of the founders of WPN and has published over 100 books. |
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| This is Patricia's latest release coming out as her thirteenth book for 2024. |
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| WPN Education and Programming Calendar |
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January
11-Jan - Westside meeting
14-Jan - BRAINSTORMING - members only
16-Jan - Webinar on Book cover design
27-Jan - Annual Marketing Panel
February
10-Feb - Green Room- members only
11-Feb - IWOC Editing
17-Feb - Webinar - Media training for authors
24-Feb - Independent Publishers Panel
March
10-Mar - Green Room- members only
18-Mar - Webinar
31-Mar - Panel on Humor
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| Bits and Pieces—News You Might Have Missed |
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James Patterson is Santa for Booksellers
Six hundred booksellers will receive $500 holiday bonuses from James Patterson. “Booksellers save lives. Period. I’m happy to acknowledge them and their hard work this holiday season.”
https://tinyurl.com/mtjfn65d
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| Bookend: Lushness in the Library |
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The Downtown Reno Library of Washoe County, Nevada, is a boxy building from the outside—this is what patrons find inside. A plan to locate the new library in a park fell through, so Hewitt C. Wells, the architect, decided to locate the park inside the library. Trees, greenery, and a reflecting pool welcome patrons. There is no watering system, so gardener Leon Lewis has watered each plant once a week for twenty years—by hand.
Read more: https://tinyurl.com/5383uf9z
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Good news! New Jersey Delivers a Victory for the Freedom to Read—and for Librarians by Andrew Albanese https://tinyurl.com/cncr7k6r
Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, and Vermont have also enacted Freedom to Read laws. New Jersey’s law forbids pulling books from circulation because of “viewpoint discrimination” and requires schools and public libraries to establish clear policies for challenging reading materials. It also protects educators, librarians, and staffers from civil or criminal liability.
Although many people would find it annoying to be challenged regarding books, the librarian cited in this story was called a pedophile, a groomer of children, and a pornographer—and it was videoed and has been viewed over 6,000 times on YouTube. In addition, she was confronted in public and her car was vandalized, and there have been demands she be fired from her job and be arrested.
Work to support Freedom to Read laws in your state.
****
Pop-up restaurants are a popular way for chefs to hear feedback on their menus without the expense of a permanent location. Now, libraries are following the trend by displaying a QR code in places large numbers of people pass by: airports, hotels, restaurants, coffee bars, shopping malls (for those who wait for the actual shoppers), and more.
Libraries can share curated e-books, audiobooks, and newspaper and magazine collections—no app or library card required at off-site locations.
Find out more at: Baker & Taylor | ePopUp Library
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Keep a list of research sites you never heard of:
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedias, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - A search for the contents of twenty thousand worldwide libraries. Find the closest copy of the rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com
- Access to more than ten million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br - A library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - Volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost four million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov - An American state search engine on 2,200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.base-search.net
- One of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents; 70 percent of them are free.
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100 Book Marketing Ideas For Authors - Written Word Media
https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/100-book-marketing-ideas-for-authors/
Categories include:
Online Presence, Content Marketing, Social Media Strategies, Traditional Media, Community Engagement, Online Book Promotion, Paid Advertising, Networking, Creative Marketing, Events and Appearances, Online Sales Strategies, Reader Engagement, Partnerships and Sponsorships, Visual Marketing, Content Distribution, Advanced Strategies, Leveraging Data, Author Branding, Utilizing Technology, Cross-Promotion
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Ever think of selling your books in a grocery store? Someone did, and now you can too.
Considerations https://authorsingrocerystores.com/considerations
Things to consider:
Registrations is $100
There’s a one-time $25 entry fee PER ISBN
Yearly renewal is $75
Program pays 62 percent of your book sales
You must be able to pack in and pack out
Genres include fantasy, romance, sci-fi, fiction, historical, humor, mystery, and self-help.
So far, the program is only available in Alaska, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Louisiana, Idaho, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, California, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, and Maryland.
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Penguin Random House has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors’ intellectual property against being used for training AI.
https://tinyurl.com/2ebb86h6
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Can AI replace employees? Read more, as seen on LinkedIn.
Fintech firm opts for AI over hiring by Kara Reinhardt, Editor at LinkedIn News
https://tinyurl.com/3h2u92n6
The company’s CEO says the number of workers has dropped by 22 percent as employees retire or quit. They haven’t hired anyone in the last year but use AI to do the work of seven hundred customer service agents. He says no one quits because they are paid well.
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WPNews is edited by Lynn Varon, a professional copy editor working on articles and manuscripts.https://varon.com/
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