Blog

The Authors Guild

Along Publishers Row

Posted February 3, 2015

by Campbell Geeslin

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the seven-foot, two-inch retired basketball star, was in New York to attend the annual meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars last week. His first novel, Mycroft Holmes, a thriller about Sherlock Holmes’s older brother, is due out in Fall.

Abdul-Jabbar told The New Yorker that he had begun reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he was a rookie with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969. He said Holmes’ methods had helped him figure out an opponent’s weaknesses on the basketball court. He heard the ball boys saying that opponent Bob Lanier sneaked cigarettes during half time. Abdul-Jabbar then knew that if he made Lanier run, “he would be in pain. These are the little clues I pick up.”

Abdul-Jabbar said, “I make deductions. That’s what I do. Hey, I read Sherlock Holmes.”

Read More…

New Books by Members

Posted February 2, 2015

This week’s recent and upcoming books by our members include titles by James Abel, Dianna Booher, Michael Brandow, Doreen Cronin, Julie Danneberg, Ju Ephraime, Barbara Harris, Lin Kaymer, Jay Neugeboren, Michael Northrop, Eve Pell, and Roger Rosenblatt. Titles below the jump.

Read More…

Times Revisits 1988 Guild Campaign to Credit Phantom Novelist

Posted January 30, 2015

When The Phantom of the Opera opened on Broadway in 1988, the musical—which Andrew Lloyd Weber adapted from Gaston Leroux’s 1910 French novel—was an immediate hit, securing 10 Tony nominations in its first year on stage. But Leroux didn’t receive credit in the official production billing. The Authors Guild was part of a group that fixed that, and the New York Times revisited the 27-year-old story in its Morning Briefing earlier this week (subscription required).

Leroux’s absence from the billing had irked a young film assistant named Bill O’Connell, who organized a coalition of rights groups and authors to make sure Leroux received credit.

The coalition included the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the Mystery Writers of America and the authors Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, E.L. Doctorow and Harlan Ellison.

Bulletin Board

Posted January 30, 2015

This week, we’re spotlighting four prizes from the AWP. The deadline for each is Feb 28.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) sponsors annual competitions for book-length works: the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, both of which award the winners $5,500 and publication, as well as AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction and AWP Prize for the Novel, the winners of which receive $2,500 and publication.

Read More…

“We All Gotta Eat, Even When Making Art”—Stiles Responds to Salon Piece on Money and Authorship

Posted January 28, 2015

Money is the single biggest practical issue facing a working writer—so why don’t we talk about it more often and more openly? Enter Ann Baur’s refreshing call for writers to be more honest about money, published in Salon yesterday.

In the article, which is generating some worthwhile discussion in the comments section, Baur pulls back the curtain on what allows her to sustain her writing life: her husband’s substantial salary. In doing so, she recognizes the importance of open discussion about the financial realities of authorship in the digital age, especially now that downward pressures on book revenue have made it difficult for even the most dedicated writer to make ends meet. “In my opinion,” Baur writes, “we do enormous ‘let them eat cake’ disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed.”

AG Council member T.J. Stiles applauded the Baur piece when he posted a response to it. Stiles’ response took the conversation a step further, connecting decreasing book revenues to the erosion of copyright protection and the growth of digital piracy. Here it is, in full.

Read More…

Along Publishers Row

Posted January 28, 2015

by Campbell Geeslin

“A remarkable thing about the novel is that it can incorporate almost anything,” wrote Thad Ziolkowski in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. He directs the writing program at Pratt Institute and is the author of a novel, Wichita.

The novel, he said, “can contain essays, short stories, mock memoirs, screenplays, e-mails—and remain a novel. This elasticity is also a sign that unlike, say, the epic or the ode, the novel is a living, evolving form. But if its outer limits are virtually nonexistent, the minimum requirement is generally that there be a narrator telling us something. In this way, any manner of book can find a way to justify calling itself a novel, but the label should not be worn lightly since it invites scrutiny of the highest and most exacting kind.”

Read More…

New Books by Members

Posted January 28, 2015

This week’s recent and upcoming books by our members include titles by Kathi Appelt, Matt de la Peña, Jan Ellison, James Grippando, Eleanor Lerman, Walter Mosley, Gene Perret, Harrison Rashad, Tom Rumer, Rebecca Scherm, Sharma Shields, and Tracy Weber. Titles below the jump.

Read More…

Report Calls Out Credit Cards’ Ties with Piracy; Senator Leahy Takes Action

Posted January 23, 2015

There’s no question that websites trafficking in stolen creative works profit handsomely from their piracy, compete unfairly with legitimate sites, and generally play the role of the thorn in the side of creators everywhere.

The question is how to stop them. Many of these sites are hosted offshore, and any writer who’s tried to send a DMCA takedown notice knows that once a pirated work has been taken down, there’s a decent chance it will pop back up somewhere else.

A recent report commissioned by the Digital Citizens Alliance proposes an answer: put pressure on the companies whose services the pirates depend on, and who profit in turn from the piracy. “All it takes for bad operators to succeed,” the report says, “is for the facilitators of commerce—payment processors and the advertising industry, among other stakeholders—to do nothing.”

Read More…

Bulletin Board

Posted January 23, 2015

This week’s batch includes a mixed bag of prizes including a residency, a translation prize, and an award that caters to writers with families. Deadlines range from Feb 1-Feb 27.

The Philip Roth Residence in Creative Writing offers emerging writers four months of writing time at Bucknell University, without formal academic obligations, so that they may complete their first or second book. Bucknell now offers two residencies each year, one in each semester. The fall residency extends from late August to mid-December; the spring residency from mid-February to late May. Each residency provides on-campus housing, an office in the Stadler Center, and a stipend of $5,000. This year the residencies will be awarded to prose. Deadline: February 1, 2015. For more information, visit the website.

Read More…

Amazon Is Not the Reader’s Friend, Says Debate Audience

Posted January 20, 2015

A lively audience of readers gathered last Thursday evening at New York City’s Kaufman Center to hear a panel of four authors hash out the contentious proposition that “Amazon is the reader’s friend.”

The Oxford-style debate, hosted by Intelligence Squared (IQ2), featured two writers arguing for the motion and two against it. In the Amazon corner were self-publishing guru Joe Konrath and Matthew Yglesias, Executive Editor of Vox. Pitted against them, former Authors Guild President Scott Turow and Franklin Foer, former Editor of The New Republic, contended that Amazon is not, by a long shot, the reader’s friend.

The IQ2 debates declare a winner by polling the audience at both the beginning and the end of the arguments, and comparing the results. The side that sways more people takes the cake. Before the debate, 41% of the audience voted for the proposition that Amazon is the reader’s friend, 28% voted against it, and 31% were undecided. At evening’s end, there was a clear victor: the Amazon apologists managed to increase their backers by a mere one percentage point, while Turow and Foer earned a 22% spike, overwhelmingly capturing the undecided vote.

Throughout the evening, Yglesias and Konrath largely stuck with the appealing arguments that Amazon’s low prices for readers and higher royalty rates for its self-published authors are benefits without downsides. But Turow and Foer’s effectiveness lay in taking a position that honored the diversity of the literary ecosystem. Left unchecked, they suggested, we may end up with a book world controlled by Amazon. The better option by far is a competitive plurality of publishers and distributors.

Read More…