- At August 16, 2006
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
8
All right, feeling more myself, finally. Went to a fun reading last night by Elizabeth Austen and Christine Deavel at the new-age shop (with a great stage) SoulFood Books. I finally got some work done, yay! Maybe the lull in August is normal – after all, it seems like about 5,000 things start being due in September – job openings, book contests, lit mags, grant applications.
Any techies still out there reading this blog? If so, you may want to vote in the Made in Express contest where all the contestents (all men, by the way, what’s up, women of technology?) have created their own cool little projects, including a very interesting robot project. Disclosure: One of the contestents may be related to me. Hint: my father is a robot scientist. I’ll leave the rest up to you.
http://www.madeinexpresscontest.com/finalists.asp
Next, two items in the “Crass Commercial World o’ Poetry” Department…oh, the cynicism…
This note on What the Hell is Up With Your Author Photo…How much should we stress out over those book photos anyway? Well…see this article from Writer’s Digest…writersdigest.com/articles/hogan_bookjacket.asp
It talks about how a magazine sent out a post to PR reps for publishers in NYC asking to see pics of an “Attractive female writer, aged 25-35” for a feature they were doing. Which seems like style before substance, no? On the plus side, this matters more for multi-million selling fiction writers that poets.
Also, I saw an interesting ad somewhere for a $600 conference for first poetry book manuscripts, where participants got to hang out with key publishing folks (publishers from Four Way, Alice James, Tupelo, etc) and got manuscript critiques. It seems like it’s a lot cheaper option than an MFA for folks who are just trying to get a first book out there and don’t care about teaching. What do you guys think of this? Is it a trend? Do you think it’s worth it? I probably would have considered something like this, when I was pondering the big scary poetry publishing world four or five years ago and felt like a clueless outsider…
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World.Ā Her latest,Ā Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Jordan
For $600 you can produce a perfectly fine docutech book on your own.
I think this conference is a horrible idea and I’m ashamed of the presses that are participating in it.
jeannine
No, Jordan, tell us how you really feel! š
I assume what you don’t like is how the conference takes your money and leaves you nothing in return (Except maybe a better sense of how the system works.) But I know a lot of writers who get seriously depressed because they’ve sent their MS into one contest (say, the Yale Younger Poets) every year for ten years and never won (the shock!) I mean, wouldn’t it be better for them to know a little bit more about:
a. the small press publishing biz
b. how their manuscript stacks up in the eyes of professional editors
and, isn’t it better than some poor person spending hundreds of dollars every year in contests just to get shot down, but not know why?
This is not a defense of the conference, I’m genuinely interested…and I’m assuming the people who would be interested in this would be people who might think the idea of self-publishing slightly scandalous…hence their not already going the self-publish route…
Radish King
Wouldn’t it be easier (and cheaper) to just fuck one of the press editors?
And maybe those manuscripts that went out over and over (and over) weren’t very good.
On the other hand, it’s all about networking.
xo
David Vincenti
I think you hit the point when you said It seems like it’s a lot cheaper option than an MFA for folks who are just trying to get a first book out there and don’t care about teaching. and I think Jordan’s comment (though it may not seem so) completely agrees with you – it just sets another point to the left on the time-and-money investment scale, for those who really just want their legacy perfect-bound and distributable.
I probably wouldnt shell $600 out for a chance to rub elbows unless I knew I’d get 2-4 genuine, earnest reviews from presses interested in “my kind of stuff”. But then, I’d be substituting time and energy researching for the $$$ of the conference.
Each writer should make the investment that suits their purpose.
louise
Well, I don’t know about that conference idea. It seems like it might be taking advantage of people’s desperation. Not a nice quality in my mind.
And that thing about the young attractive female doesn’t surprise me, but does dismay me.
Rusty
Ai! I may slightly biased, but the MFA program allows you to continually interact with so many more cool, interesting, and bizarre people. Ahem. Not that either of us are bizarre. OK, we are, but don’t tell anyone.
On the other hand, getting to know the ropes directly on the publishing end (which our MFA program doesn’t really focus on)is kind of cool.
That thing about your father, by the way, is so totally awesome. Robots! I thought your father’s robot was playing the ice cream truck music that was in the background for a minute, but apparently not.
Lana
I don’t know if I was qualified to, or supposed to, but I just voted for your dad.
–Lana
jeannine
Thanks Lana š I think it’s okay – it’s just for the “community” prize, which is kind of like the Miss Congeniality award for programming.
Rusty – hilarious – I had no idea my Dad’s blog played music!
Thanks everyone for the feedback on the weird conference. I wonder if it’s the start of a trend?