Vintage Links from the To-Read Folder: Word Counts, YA Editors; My Little Pony; Book Tours

Readers love to talk about the piles of unread books they’ve been accumulating over the years, breaking out plans to put a dent in the pile if only so they can justify purchasing new books to fill the gap. We can take a certain pleasure in what that unread book signifies, in both the look at all the pleasures that await me when I have time sense and the behold my default state of busy sense.

We tend to be a bit quieter about the unread piles of links and bookmarks we accumulate, unless someone looks over our shoulders and spots a massive pile of unread tabs. Or, in my case, taps the “To Read” folder in my bookmarks bar and gets assaulted by the 300+ blog posts I’ve stored there to engage with later.

Lots of these were put there during my days with the writers centre, flagging resources I might want to come back to later or could be useful when answering a particular call. Others were just me flagging stuff I wanted to read outside of work hours, which I never got around to because I didn’t prioritise such things.

Today, I’m diving into the archive of unread links and picking four to share with you, post about, and then delete from my list forever. Join me as I put a dent into the pile. 

Her Stinging Critiques Propel Young Adult Bestsellers (New York Times, 2015) 

Read the full article at the New York Times (if you’ve got enough free articles left this month)

In the cosseted world of children’s book publishing, getting an editorial letter from Ms. Strauss-Gabel, the publisher of Dutton Children’s Books, is the literary equivalent of winning a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. It virtually guarantees critical or commercial success, and often brings both.

A few years back the New York Times did a profile on  Julie Strauss-Gabel, one of the top editors in the YA genre who has been associated with a number of hit novels. It’s the kind of thing that would get shared around our offices at the time—the staff was full of YA fans and we were all talking to people about writing, editing, and publishing on a daily basis. I remember flagging it because it was about the kind of editorial relationships lots of writers hope for in the traditional scene—an ongoing, developmental partnerships—and it talks about exactly how rare those relationship are in modern publishing. 

How To Plan Your Own Book Tour (Bill Ferris @ Writer Unboxed, 2015)

Read the full article at Writer Unboxed.

They say book tours don’t sell books. In fact, they can actually cost authors a lot of money. So why bother? Well, you’re making connections with readers and building your brand and a bunch of other slick-sounding, unquantifiable marketing-speak. If you want to be a big-shot author, you need to act the part, and that means taking your show on the road. Think of a book tour as a tax-write-off-able vacation where people tell you how awesome you are every night.

Book tours are one of those legacy promotional vehicles from the days before the internet, a method of connecting readers with their favourite authors in a world where you couldn’t just tweet Neil Gaiman about how much you loved one of his books. Like book launches, they hold a particular place in aspiring author’s hearts—people would ask about organising tours and book launches on a weekly basis, usually hoping for some magic thing that would transform their book-that-is-doing-okay into a book-that-is-wildly-successful.

Like many things in writing, the dream is predicated on an American vision of bookselling, where you’ve got a population pretty evently distrubited around the country and biggish cities throughout. Australia is big and empty, which means a local tour involves travelling long distances for a handful of stops.

Within this understanding, I remember thinking that Ferris’ post was remarkably clear-sighted and useful, so I flagged it as a resource to direct people towards when they were insistent that their tour would be different and they’d recoup the expenditure through sales.

Welcome to the Heard: A Feminist Watches My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Global Comment, 2011)

Read the full editorial at Global Comment

There’s a lot going on with MLP:FiM, including a sizable adult male viewership (of which, more later), but the most important thing to me about the show is this: it presents a world in which the normative position is female.

I found myself watching the first seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with my flatmate back in 2012. Initially, it caught me with a joke about Buzzards that Really Buzz, then followed it up with Fluttershy singing like Barry White, but the thing that kept me watching was decentreing of the male point of view and the focus on friendship. Like another favourite show in recent years—Supergirl—it focused on conflicts and resolutions that were meaningful and decidedly fresh, coupled with some particularly smart writing.

That said, I kinda wish this post were longer and went into its points in more depth, particularly revisiting it many years after it was first written. 

The Daily Word Count of 39 Famous Writers (Writers Write, 2015) 

Read the full post at Writers Write.

Two nice things this post does: first, it appends a quote about writing to the word counts for each of the authors they’re focusing on; second, it’s listing all these numbers with a point:

Creating a habit of writing – even if what you are writing is not good – is vital.

The word count, going by the varied targets of the wildly successful authors on their list, is not. Although I am surprised at the number of people who aim for 1,000 words, rather than the highly touted (and occasionally problematic) 2,000 that people start aiming for after they read On Writing.