A professional writing blog I read recently started a digital portfolio showcase feature, and one of the people they featured describes himself as a fiction writer. As far as I can tell, he has no book publishing credits, so it really is more of a portfolio rather than an author webpage. And it’s got me thinking.
As some of you may know, I also have an online portfolio, but I’ve been wondering recently about its use to me as an unpublished fiction writer. Yes, I also showcase my design (and, soon, my editing skills), but since I don’t have a following and I’m not trying to convince anyone to buy anything, I wonder if it’s worth it to continue to maintain the creative writing section. Here are my thoughts:
- None of my work appears online for me to link to—in fact I have no publishing credits as of yet
- Anything I aim to eventually publish cannot be posted on my website due to copyright issues and so I’m left showcasing the stuff I know isn’t publishable, that is in fact some of my weakest work
- Maybe one day when I do have a name I can release new material on my site and it will still be respectable, but that day is a long way off
- But I do still want people to know I am a creative writer
So help me out here: What is the value in maintaining the creative writing section of my website? Does anyone else have one?
I’m not sure what’s more bothersome to me here, the title (that makes me cringe for those two nasty Ls right next to each other) or the fact that someone out in publishingland (see how I did that there? doesn’t it hurt you inside?) thought that Tyra Banks is qualified to write YA books. Yup, that’s right, fiction.
What’s really sad about it is that, with the industry the way it is right now, how badly it’s hurting for money, she probably is. Her name alone will sell books. But instead of writing a book on her life, or America’s Next Top Model, she goes for fiction, and this confuses me. (It also makes me wonder if there are fiction ghostwriting gigs.)
And—all right, I admit I’m jealous, but not because I myself was eyeing the up-til-now untapped market of teenage modeling novels. I’m looking at this from a budgetary standpoint, and as an aspiring novelist. One book (or one book series) isn’t going to turn the industry around, but it sure looks like a good temporary fix if you’re in charge. And all that advance money that’s going to Tyra Banks…well, it isn’t being used on new or higher-risk writers.
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I used to work at a Borders, and the wrath I experienced at that time–at the blithering corporate idiocy that was slowly running their company into the ground–is the stuff of legends. None of the mind-numbingly stupid things I had to do (alphabetizing dictionaries, switching all of the inventory on one bookshelf to another three times in two days) compared to the soul-killing hours I spent in charge of the magazines.
Thus begins a snarky and pretty intelligent post about why magazine sales are suffering and how its the corporate Borders-type mentality that’s driving them down.
Read here.
I’ve had my head buried in a book for most of the day (don’t worry, I got my daily writing done, too) reading The Virgin Suicides (which is fantastic, by the way) instead of brainstorming blog ideas. However, I noticed I’ve amassed quite the collection of interesting links in the past few days, so I’ve decided to share those instead. Take a look and share what you’ve been reading lately!
The 2010 AWP conference is just a few short weeks away, and if you’ve been to the conference before you know how overwhelming a scene it can be–hordes of small presses and literary magazines promoting their newest products, all of them vying for the same, ever-shrinking readership. What is perhaps most fascinating is that most of them follow the same publishing model and even use the same, tired language to describe themselves (“[Name of magazine] is dedicated to publishing the finest prose and poetry”). By the end of the three day bookfair, it’s hard to decipher one publisher from the next; attendees are usually left with the overwhelming feeling of sameness and the not-so-difficult decision of which complimentary copies to leave behind (this giving-the-milk-away-for-free sales model is a conversation for another post). I don’t think I’m saying anything new here. Hell, this very site (which is closely linked to a lit mag) has even lampooned the standard submission call. For better or for worse, a lit mag is a lit mag is a lit mag.
But there are some exceptions, some intrepid folks out there are trying new things, and the following is a brief list of the more interesting print endeavors out there (sure, you can do a lot with digital media, but you can’t sell it at book fair):
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Last December, there was a flurry of responses to what could be a milestone in digital publishing: the Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to post a four-part, 19,000-word account of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks exclusively online. The report itself, by journalist Jason Motlagh, is a testament to the value of detailed, feet-on-the-street long-form journalism, one of the species made endangered by the Great Media Upheaval. Motlagh covers the attacks from dozens of points of view, untangling a series of chaotic events across multiple days and involving hundreds of principals.
The central theme running through the responses mostly runs along the lines of “holy shit, a web site is publishing a huge serious-journalism article.” At Fingerlakes Wanderer, Lorraine Berry writes, “As far as I know, this is the first time that an article of such importance and length has been published as a Web-only feature by a print magazine.” And Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times notes that this type of reporting is typically reserved for “a handful of larger-circulation magazines such as the New Yorker,” pointing out that “other venues have been retreating from this kind of extensively researched international writing.”
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There have been a number of times in the past when people have panicked over the unwashed hordes bashing against the ivory gates of literature. And apparently, the newest threat, the most insidious of them all is the advent of the e-reader. The Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and the Apple Tablet are supposed to be the four horsemen of the literary apocalypse.
At a conference I attended, somebody actually stood up and shouted, “They are going to destroy publishing!”
These people are usually the same ones who piss and moan about the impending death of the written word, the same people who buy exotic paper made from an African river reed, and only write with a particular brand of fountain pen. They say nobody reads anymore, and maybe they’re right. But why aren’t we celebrating the e-reader? After all, it makes books more accessible. Maybe someone will accidentally preview the first few pages of Jack Kerouac, instead of Jane Anne Krentz, and who knows, actually enjoy it. Read more »
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